Computer Information Exchange

Computers were originally shared during the early days of UNIX because of the high cost of commercial computer systems mostly owned by large universities and wealthy businesses. Bell Labs & GE sold to Honeywell. An early computer game was Space Travel. A nice an mildly addicting game but cost $50 to $70 per session to play on shared time computer systems. Tapes in the PDP-7 were manual labor and time consuming. 

New file systems designed with copying, pasting, editing, and the concept of the file improved with reading and writing, abstracting the hardware, anyone on any device can make changes to a file, one of the killer apps of UNIX. 

Operating Systems were platforms for software development early on, as UNIX on the PDP7 enabled a platform to do programming on. DEC-PDP11 was the new computer at $65,000 with a file system for creating and editing text files. Now written in assembly low level language, UNIX could work on the PCP11. Line numbered pages became a popular way and with multiple versions a method for widespread software development. 

UNIX was developed on humble hardware with limited computational resources on $100K+ computers were cheaper than half million dollar Mainframes in 1977. Programming in C enabled UNIX to be ported to many different hardware architectures. UNIX was only a few hundred dollars. UNIX could be modified readily to suit end user needs as well. 

AT&T had a monopoly on the US Telephone system made their technologies available to all academic use cases, the spreading groundbreaking transistor technologies. AT&T had the source code of AT&T and provided to university students who had more time than money. UNIX had gone worldwide by the end of the 1970's. 

Version 6 was installed on the PDP11 mini-computer, with a pascal implementation with excellent error handling but was hard to understand. The pascal compiler recovered from errors well, and the Berkley variant became popular. 2BSD followed in 1978. VAX11780 released with virtual memory was a game changing feature in 1973 as 3BSD and new leading edge UNIX releases. DARPA sought to have a common UNIX computer environment able to hand different hardware. Features were added by the CSRG to 3BSD to make new 4BSD, and early protocols for TCP-IP or what enabled the internet today. Networking computers enabled SUN and others to rapidly commercialized computer information systems into many areas of society as a commercial activity, with the workstation running scientific and engineering applications, with SUN OS that branched off UNIX 4.2. Networking SUN computers became valuable clusters, causing SUN to rise. 

By the late 1980's Santa Cruise Operation sold UNIX variants running on X86 computers, the bases for what became a popular hardware CPU instruction set configuration running on Intel chips, later known for dominating the PC market as WINTEL or Windows Intel computers that became a family home computer with Window 95 causing sales of computers to soar to great commercial success. ONXY Systems sold variants of UNIX running on Zilog chip based computers. 

Personal Computers or PC's were the products that became laptops, then tablets & smartphones, the APPs that run on Android and iOS have a deep layered history to MS Windows. 16-big micro-computers called Xenix. Steve Jons NeXT workstations by 1985 running OS NeXTSTEP derived from 4.3BSD Tahoe. 

Computers were largely developed by people interested in the technology, not making money from it. The early days were mostly academic and hobby scale efforts much later commercialized into products sold for a profit. Here we see a good example of how science and technology today often emerges because of a mental focus on innovation, not a greedy focus on making money! 

Obviously innovating into a commercial product requires money or resources, so to apply computers broadly in society many large computer businesses needed to market and sell them with killer software applications, today spawning who profitable industries of app development and software engineering :) Looking forward cryptography innovation and AGI AI seem to be bright areas of ongoing computational innovation with lots of room for improvement for hundreds of years :) 

When TSMC mastered Copper Interconnects in CPU chip fab technology back in the 130nm node era it was the seeds of chip fab domination set to play out in 5nm smartphone SOC for customers like Apple that have Apple Silicon made by TSMC as the largest customer :) 

DRAM & NAND FLASH or Solid State storage with fast data IO are trending today. Increasing the SOC cache memory size makes even more performance. Many cores and packing on package many chips such as combining the CPU and GPU in AMD gaming oriented chips, and on server chips with many more cores to handle lots of users, namely in cloud computer or SAS systems. 

Software as a Service means subscriptions that creating ongoing revenue that generates bigger continual profits, an idea that pervades society today, with some even calling for car ownership to give way to vehicle access as a service or vehicle subscription service with L5 full autonomy or full strong autopilot vehicles able to serve many people when operating 24/7, vs privately owned cars which are rarely operated more than 2 hours per day and sit off for 22 hours per day mostly underutilized. That might sound good for a museum, but it means the capital depreciation of cars over time and with use means people who own cars lose money so fast it costs more than a car subscription service from future autonomous vehicle fleet companies that will sell such car subscriptions for a monthly fee. Strong benefits include never worrying about car maintenance, repairs or services, free road side assistance and included insurance without a separate policy. Interestingly its become of the integration of so many kinds of computer systems into cars that self driving cars or fully autonomy cars with full strong L5 or level 5 autonomy or full autopilot will even become possible in the near future.