Which company or individual can sponsor me on a summer trip to Europe?

[Nadav Har'El]

On Mon, Jul 07, 2014, geoffrey mendelson wrote about "Re: Which company or individual can sponsor me on a summer trip to Europe?":
> All I know is that in 1990 I bought an AT&T UNIX system which
> included the AT&T KERNEL, a lot of closed source software and a lot
> of open source BSD utilities. There was lots of open source programs
> for UNIX, many of them were public domain (similar to the BSD
> license). It did have X windows on it, but with my 2 meg of RAM
> 386SX, it would not run.

In 1990, I was also using AT&T SVr4 on a 386sx. There was no
"open source phenonmenon" at the time - the Open Source world
mostly included GNU, Unix stuff from Berkeley (BSD, Vi, TCL/TK, etc.),
Columbia University (Kermet), MIT (X11), and little more.

GNU was definitely a big piece of the open source world at the
time - if not the biggest.

> 
> By 1995, I was purchasing CD ROMs, with BSD (scrubbed after the
> lawsuit), which came with a large library of UNIX code, and LINUX
> distros (more than one), which came with the BSD libraries.
> 
> GCC did not come into general use (or at all AFAIK) until SUN
> started selling Solaris, because SUNOS required you to compile and
> link modules to change KERNEL parameters, so it came with a C
> compiler and linker.

In 1992, I was using SunOS, and although I loved it, I quickly
found myself piecementally replacing pieces of it by free software,
most of it GNU. By 1994, I was using almost exclusively GNU tools -
the GNU fileutils instead of the SunOS (BSD-based) ones, GNU groff
instead of AT&T troff, GNU Emacs, Gnu make, Gnu bison instead of yacc,
and yes, Gcc and the GNU linker utilities. GNU had a huge imact on
my computing in the early 1990s, though definitely not the only free
software I used (I also used X11 and Tcl/TK, for example).


> 
> System 5 UNIX did not, you had to have a linker, but not a compiler,
> so the C compiler was not included and cost a lot of money. GCC was
> popularized so that people could compile things on their SUNS
> without spending a lot of money for a compiler.

I had AT&T SVr4 *with* a compiler, so this was not an issue for me,
but gcc was simply *better*, and got better every day, while the SVr4
C compiler was buggy, outdated, and never improved.

Another great thing going for the GNU project stuff was excellent
documentation - which sadly didn't inspire GNU's followers :(

-- 
Nadav Har'El                        |        Wednesday, Aug 6 2014, 10 Av 5774
nyh at math.technion.ac.il             |-----------------------------------------
Phone +972-523-790466, ICQ 13349191 |Isn't Disney World a people trap operated
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