> By porting Unix to the PDP-11 in 1970, the group ensured Unix would live on into the future.<p>I have a question about that. Why would they do this?<p>What was so valuable in these few lines of (mostly proprietary) code, that you would make the effort to port instead of just writing from scratch on the new machine?<p>If you take a look at what came later, a lot of much more substantial software packages were made by a single bedroom coder in his spare time.<p>Why port? It couldn't be to save effort? (At least the conceptual level of things would remain the same if you start from scratch.)
Note CRTs where a luxury item in the early 1970s. A 5x7x64 character generator requires 2240 bits uncompressed. Perhaps get closer to 1K if you had some run length compression. In my 1975 MIT digital lab the 1K memory chips where kept locked up because they were the most expensive chips at that time. By 1977 a lab I worked in bought a CRT terminal for each student because character ROMs had dropped in price.
<a href="https://bsdimp.blogspot.com/2019/10/video-footage-of-first-pdp-7-to-run-unix.html" rel="nofollow">https://bsdimp.blogspot.com/2019/10/video-footage-of-first-p...</a> has some further speculation... Footage of the PDP-7 that ken would later use to create Unix.
> V0 Unix could run on only one of the PDP-7s.<p>Wow, I wonder how the history of UNIX would have panned out if that machine hadn't happened to land at Bell Labs.
Amazing that the Unix of that day ran on an 8KB (not MB, not GB), 8KB machine with just 1MB (not GB, not TB), much-slower than today's SSD's, disk.<p>Compare that to Linux, its most popular descendant Unix of today...<p>Today's Linux requires a tad more memory and disk than that... just a <i>tad</i>... <g>