att & osf

[Henry Spencer]

In article <2857 at ttrdc.UUCP> levy at ttrdc.UUCP (Daniel R. Levy) writes:
>...  The UNIX operating system (and its structure
>and philosophy... came to exist because of AT&T.

No, actually, they came to exist because of the Bell System.  Any resemblance
to today's AT&T is accidental.  :-)

>... How you could legitimately turn MacQuarrie's quote above
>into a "claim that [AT&T is] bending over backwards to..."

Actually, fairly easily.  He claimed that they had worked extremely hard
to provide a hardware-independent operating system.  I pointed out that
they had worked hard to provide a system which ran on all the hardware
*they* were interested in using or selling.  There is a difference!

Even there, one should note that the original work to make the system
portable was largely done by the Bell Labs research people; AT&T has
since basically done diddly-squat about improving portability, since the
remaining portability problems didn't affect *them*.  (They've done a
little bit of work on portability, but they've also introduced some new
and gratuitous portability problems of their own, so the overall balance
is roughly zero.)
-- 
Intel CPUs are not defective,  |     Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
they just act that way.        | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry at zoo.toronto.edu