How We Built on Shoulders of Giants -John Haddock

 This piece is in devlopment phase.

This am accountant given by John Haddock  in 2018.

MIT

GE

Berkeley came in lately but was involved in BSD. 

Denis went on sabbatical to Berkeley with his magnetic tape and there Unix became BSD and at AT &T it became  Unix System 3,4 and 5.

Bell lab was interested in transistors, fiber optics and laser and not on  operating system or applications.

 

Computers were considered not useful to Telephone Companies at that time.

 

It started in Bell's Lab in New Jersey.

The idea was to develop a Portable Operating System that ran on many platforms by Brian Thompson and Dennis Richie.

 

They used a cast-off PDP7 computer for their work. 

There was no assembly language. They used machine language which was written on a paper tape on another computer and ported it to the PHP7.

Up till then, operating system were fixed to the hardware  or the applications they ran.

In around 1983, Digital Equipment Company, IBM and HP saw Unix has commercial space outside academic environment. 

However, they had to pay a hefty fee for the Source Code to AT & T and the serial number of the computer using the Source Code had to be given to them for scrutiny.

Later on Sun Micro Systems requested them to lower the fee by offering them the Binary Code and a request to wave off the serial number of the computer.

BSD had TCP / IP. 

There was litigation by AT & T on a BSDI company over copyright issue.

 

1984 Richard Stallman came in and objected to Source Code copyright and wanted the software to be Free.

Objectives

Make the kernel small so the coding is free of errors.

Applications to be on User Space and any crashes when running does not affect the kernel.