Comment by kazinator

5 years ago

Unix wasn't given away for free; it was strapped by AT&T licensing and you needed hardware that certainly wasn't free, and not still not affordable to individual consumers. But Unix was a resource-efficient system that scaled down to cheaper hardware with less RAM.

Even the dyed-in-the-wool Lisp enthusiasts headed by Richard Stallman were compelled to reproduce Unix, even though their stated goal was to have a system running Lisp.

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kazinator

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bitwize  5 years ago

Stallman decided to reimplement Unix because it was popular, not because it was somehow better suited to the hardware.

One of the first GNU programs he released was indeed his "system running Lisp"; it was called Emacs.

  • kazinator  5 years ago

    This is not the complete picture. Stallman decided to reimplement Unix because it had a combination of popularity and technical merit.

    For instance, MS-DOS had a larger installed base than Unix at the time, but ... enough said about that, right?

    Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, as the saying goes.

    A hacker like RMS isn't going to pour years of coding into making a C compiler, and Unix utilities, in his spare time, if he thinks those technologies do not have merit.