[ih] Review: Yasha Levine's "Surveillance Valley"

[Clem cole]

John.  I semi beg to differ. I think Dan got the basics right.  I lived those same times and yes management did not look at everything I did.  But they owned the system, the terminals, the media, even the printer paper/consumables.  While we had a lot of latitude what we were doing had to at least consider the corporate values/plans/goals.  Yes we all had what were refered to as G-jobs on the side.  I would even say Tektronix and HP were noted for encouraging them (Woz is said to have built the prototype Apple 1 on his bench at HP as an example).  

But I really could not have done much serious computing in those days with using equipment and software licensed by my employer. I would not haven been able to afford it otherwise and I was getting paid to do it.  That was Dans observation which I think is spot on.   I don’t think most  people in those days were really in a much different position.  

Sent from my PDP-7 Running UNIX V0 expect things to be almost but not quite. 

> On Jul 5, 2018, at 5:24 PM, John Day <jeanjour at comcast.net> wrote:
> 
> One needs to be careful how one defines ‘something that would have been accessible to an individual’ in those days.  ;-)  The same with the PDP-11. (It didn’t have the /20 designation yet.)  Was the machine bought and paid for by an individual? No.  Did an individual have free access to do whatever they wanted with the machine on company or your own time? Not uncommon at all.  We had a PDP-11 in 1970 it pretty well belonged to us. Management had no idea what it was.  ;-)
> 
>> snip
>> 
>> Ken Thompson wrote the first "Unices" kernel on a cast-off PDP-7. While perhaps antiquated for 1969, is that really something that would have been accessible to an individual? 1st Edition was on a PDP-11/20; almost certainly out of the reach of individuals in the early 1970s. And the fact that they were getting *paid* to work on this is not a small point.
>> 
>>         - Dan C.
>> 
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