> I have no idea how I've never heard of this, The adage is that the victors get to write history. Apollo was a single company peddling a proprietary technology. At the time that it started Unix was offered only to academic institutions. There was no way to foresee that the consent decree constraining AT&T's activities would be lifted and that Unix would snowball into a vast community and ecosystem.
Rich Gabriel had some insightful thoughts on why Unix was so successful in his "Worse is Better" essays: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better Apollo engineering was definitely an example of what Gabriel calls the MIT or "The Right Thing" approach. > It would be almost > trivial to introduce a sane mouse interface to this idea, and then > build all kinds of applications that lever the separation of streams. I will be happy to try anything you come up with. /john
