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UNIX Advertising From Way-back-when

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the back-in-the-day dept.

Doug Muth writes: "I found this advertisement over on Dennis Ritchie's Web site. It's an advertisement for a UNIX system back from 1981 when VAX-11 and PDP-11 systems were still being used. I wonder if Ritchie ever thought UNIX would get this popular?"

9 of 112 comments (clear)

  1. History of the UNIX pipe by MAXOMENOS · · Score: 3

    Here's another bit of UNIX history from Ritchie's site: a brief history of the UNIX pipe.

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  2. 24 Years of Unix by Amphigory · · Score: 3
    This brings up the whole subject of the history of UNIX. A really good book is A quarter century of UNIX. This thing blows away a lot of the myths, and is actually quite helpful in trying to undewrstand why things are the way they are. Highly recommended.

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  3. Remember how expensive hardware was back then .... by taniwha · · Score: 4
    I distinctly remember us buying 1.5Mb of core (those little round magnetic thingys with 1uS access times) for a cool million $$ for our B6700 which supported about 30 timeshared users and a large batch stream (from honest to got card readers no less) - any 486 PC would have walked all over it.

    Anyway my point is that a mini like a PDP11 that could support 30 timeshared users for tens of thousands of $$ WAS a big deal.

  4. Congratulations, Slashdotters! by Orville · · Score: 5
    Bell Labs has been the home to an astonishing number of inventions, notably the UNIX operating system we so admire.

    The computer research division is home to such UNIX "rock stars" such as Ritchie, Thompson, Kernhigan.

    The sheer amount of talent and respect generated by Bell Labs is staggering.

    Now, all you punks have gone and 'slashdotted' thier web server! I hope you're happy, you... you bastards!

  5. Pictures of the PDP 11 by Money__ · · Score: 5
    This page has some wonderfull pictures of the "Digital PDP-11/20".

    Specs:" My PDP-11/20 was, like many machines, sold to me via the University of Wisconsin surplus program. This particular machine happened to be originally located in the Electrical Engineering Department real-time control lab that was sponsered by Professor Richard Marleau. Inside the panel, just above the CPU, is an RC11 disk drive. The RC11 is a 65K word (128 K byte) fixed head disk drive. After all these years (the system was first purchased around 1970) it still works!"

    Also this PDP-11/45 sports such wonderfull specs as:"The PDP-11/45 is of approximately the same vintage as the PDP-11/20, but is a much more sophisticated machine. For one thing, it was a micro-coded CPU. It had robust memory management, not seen in microcomputers from Intel until the 80386. It could also support two separate buses: one primarily intended for memory, and the second generally used for peripherals. This is not unlike today's "local bus" PC's. I cut my teeth on Unix on a PDP-11/45 system at the University of Wisconsin in 1976 along with my friends Paul and Hannes (among others)."

    This PDP-11/05 graphics system. " The GT40 was a graphic system, often used as a graphic terminal for DEC's PDP-10 and PDP-20 mainframe systems. The CPU was a PDP-11/05, but used the green color scheme of DEC's graphic systems rather than the magenta color scheme normally found on PDP-11's. The GT-40's main claim to fame is probably the famous Lunar Lander game, written by Jack Burness, as a consultant to Digital at the time."
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  6. Re: Where were you in 1981? by hey! · · Score: 4

    In '81 I was spending the summer sitting in a windowless lab hacking in Ratfor (a preprocessor that added C like control flow structures to Fortran IV) on a PDP-11 for controlling experiments and analyzing data; a lot of which involved writing routines to rescue data for ham handed graduate students who kept putting the damned RK05 disk packs in crooked. Didn't have a Unix account, but I did screw around on Multics for fun. A few years later I got to work on Unix System III, which was nice and clean, but god it needed a symbolic debugger (adb only gave hex addresses).

    Gosh, remember what it was like to get up and go out for a sub and sit on a park bench while your computer compiled linked a program that was altogether maybe a couple of K lines long? One misplaced semicolon could cost you hours. The first time I saw a compile run that did more than a couple of lines per second I was in awe.

    Remember when Usenet primarily ran over UUCP on 1200 baud modems?

    Remember when you could swagger into a job interview with absolutely no credentials and only a tiny bit of tenuously related experience and have them eating out the palm of your hand? I guess some things don't change that much.

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  7. Here's a mirror by Magus311X · · Score: 3

    Some brave soul is mirroring the image.

    http://reltheon.yi.org/~rgomes/unixad.htm

  8. Re:Lame ads by hey! · · Score: 3

    I think the cartoon aim's to be kind of New Yorker-ish. Something the bosses of yesteryear would associate with class and sophistication.

    In other words, they're trying to associate themselves with James Thurber's wit without bothering to produce any new wit of their own.

    It seem incomprehensible because nobody would try to sell something by making associating it with a "classy" magazine now. In twenty years, the current dot-com ads which try to borrow some of the hip by adopting a post modernist GenX look without the incisive irony will look equally pathetic, I assure you.

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  9. Send in the info coupon by Trickster+Coyote · · Score: 3

    I wonder if they would send out some literature?

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