> Well, some UNIX OSs are open source, some are not. A decade ago when many > university systems were switching over from VMS to UNIX, I didn't hear > much about open source. I'm not sure why they were doing it. It could be > that DEC was just charging too much and universities were saving money > with UNIX. I don't know. Anyone know the history? Well, actually back in the early/mid 80s there was lots of talk about open systems rather than open source. The switch in Universities was fueled (At least in my experience) by research grants. It was much easier for us to get grants from the National Science Foundation(NSF), NASA DOE or even foundations to outfit research labs with Sun 3/60s,/50s or sun 280 and SGIs and to get computational time on one of the major NSF supercomputer centers than to get $$ to pay for recurring costs of running your stat/modeling jobs on VMS or CDC Cyber 6xxx boxes. I believe the Grand Challenges initiatives and the defense programs of the early/mid 80s fueled much of the conversion because of the nature of the computational needs(the engineering problems that needed to be solved relied on a combination of visualization, number crunching and ubiquitousness of tools). Most proposals for aerospace/climate/weather/bio sci etc included MIPS, M68xxx's running some flavor of *nix*. The first time I saw some thing different was when Tannenbaum shipped his first Minix version for 8086. I saw an integrator advertise it with some sort RS software. I believe These factors could explain the speed-ed conversion but some one from the history of science may shed better light! I also believe places where the Hardware is used by more than one business unit (research and admin) lagged in conversion because they are usually dominated by pragmatists rather than visionaries who are usually early adopters. --elhaddi _______________________________________________ TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota Help beta test TCLUG's potential new home: http://plone.mn-linux.org Got pictures for TCLUG? Beta test http://plone.mn-linux.org/gallery tclug-list at mn-linux.org https://mailman.real-time.com/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list