If a user quibbled with a
certain portion, the standards made it possible to pull
out an individual subcomponent and either fix it or
replace it with something better. Simply put, what the
Unix approach lacked in terms of style or aesthetics,
it more than made up for in terms of flexibility and
economy, hence its rapid adoption.See Marshall Kirk McKusick, "Twenty Years of
Berkeley
Unix," Open Sources (O'Reilly & Associates, Inc.,
1999): 38.
Stallman's decision to start developing the GNU system
was triggered by the end of the ITS system that the AI
Lab hackers had nurtured for so long. The demise of ITS
had been a traumatic blow to Stallman. Coming on the
heels of the Xerox laser printer episode, it offered
further evidence that the AI Lab hacker culture was
losing its immunity to business practices in the
outside world.
Like the software code that composed it, the roots of
ITS' demise stretched way back. Defense spending, long
a major font for computer-science research, had dried
up during the post-Vietnam years.
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