Comment by dboreham
6 days ago
> The UNIX standard was made in part because the government > wanted an operating system standard, right?
Wrong? Or at least where's the citation to back this up?
"UNIX Standard" presumably means POSIX which was a work of the IEEE, not a government body. If some government had something to do with making it happen, I'm not aware of that. At the time (1988) UNIX wasn't used much outside of academia and niche industries.
There was a point in time where the US government was considering mandating POSIX compatibility in everything. It's why Windows NT shipped with a comically barebones POSIX subsystem and why A/UX (an Apple port of Unix to the Macintosh, years before they bought NeXT) existed.
I just read about it in chapter 2 of “Advanced programming in the UNIX environment”
It didn’t sound like the US government made it, just pushed for it and probably contributed to the initial versions