Politics (was Re: [PD-dev] Re: [PD-announce] Pd-0.38.4-extended-RC7)

[Hans-Christoph Steiner]

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 at 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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> --->
> ----->
> -------->
> -------------> (insert quote here)
>
>
> 	
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________________________________________________________________________ 
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                     There is no way to peace, peace is the way.
						        				-A.J. Muste
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