Thomas Beckett 🌲❤️🌲 is a user on social.coop. You can follow them or interact with them if you have an account anywhere in the fediverse.
What would the world be like if, instead of PCs, computing for the masses had arrived in the form of Unix-powered terminals similar to France's Minitel, administered not by the Baby Bells but by the US Postal Service with iron-clad First and Fourth Amendment protections after the US government took the rights to Unix from AT&T under eminent domain, put Unix into the public domain, and put the whole Bell Labs crew on the government payroll?
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2012/jun/28/minitel-france-says-farewell
@starbreaker Why Unix?
@tbeckett Unix was a powerful multitasking multiuser system and a potential mainframe replacement in mid-1970s, when personal computing meant buying an Altair kit, building it yourself, and programming it.
Also, I've been using some kind of Unix-style OS since I was a young man, and had never been exposed to VMS.