Actually, the military was definitely involved in UNIX, but not necessarily always directly. Instead, the U.S. military funded these computer research programs heavily, from Bell Labs to UC Berkeley. For example, MULTICS was a DARPA project, (meaning U.S. military). Bell Labs, where UNIX was developed, received lots of military funding, BSD was largely funded by DARPA at UC Berkeley, Mach was another DARPA project (Mach is the kernel in Mac OS X), and even Real Time Linux has received DARPA funding.
Unfortunately, a lot of these computer histories focus on the technical history, and leave out the military role. Instead, they talk about the institutions which did the research: MIT, UC Berkeley, Bell Labs, Stanford, etc. But the truth behind that is the research money was coming from the U.S. military, and the U.S. military was driving the research topics. The U.S. military was so dominant in the field of computers that up until the 70's, the majority of money spent on computers _in the world_ was from the U.S. military.
If you have more interest in this topic, checkout this article: http://chnm.gmu.edu/assets/historyessays/wizards.html
which is a review of this book "The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America", by Paul Edwards. http://www.si.umich.edu/~pne/cw.htm
Plus someone should update the wikipedia pages...
.hc
On Jan 26, 2006, at 9:20 AM, Ed Kelly wrote:
I stand corrected!
Ed --- Mathieu Bouchard matju@artengine.ca wrote:
On Tue, 24 Jan 2006, Ed Kelly wrote:
but never forget that the Unix operating system,
and by evolution BSD,
OSX and Linux _all_ originate from the US
military. Let us use them for
peaceful purposes.
But most of all never forget to check your facts.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix
Where's the military in there?
Chances are that you are confusing Unix with something else.
_____________________ ... | Mathieu Bouchard - tél:+1.514.383.3801 - http://artengine.ca/matju | Freelance Digital Arts Engineer, Montréal QC Canada
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