Stephen Harris wrote: > On Fri, Apr 24, 2015 at 10:38:25AM -0400, m.roth at 5-cent.us wrote: >> Fascinating. As I'd been in Sun OS, and started doing admin work when it >> became Solaris, I'd missed that bit. A question: did the license >> agreement include payment, or was it just restrictive on distribution? > > In 1990, when I started using ksh88, it was totally commercial. Binaries > were $$$ and source was $$$$. We bought the source and compiled it for > SunOS, Ultrix and various SYSVr[23] machines (one machine was so old it > didn't understand #! and so needed it placed as /bin/sh). I just (finally) got into Unix in '91, and didn't do any admin work, just programming, until later in '95, and I had nothing to do with what software got installed, at least to start (I sat there while someone else was doing the installing). And that was a Sun, anyway. > > By 1998, ksh93 was free (as in beer) but was restricted distribution. > Eventually ksh93 became properly free, but by this point bash was > already popular in the Free-nix arena and had even made it into > Solaris, AIX and others. > >> I didn't know bash till I got to CentOS (I don't remember it in RH >> 9...), > > Yes it was. It was in RH(not EL) 4, which was the first RH I used. Ah. I don't remember if I was using csh, or ksh, and didn't realize about bash. I *think* I vaguely remember that sh seemed to be more capable than I remembered. My first RH was 5, late nineties. First time I looked at linux and installed, it was '95, and slack. (We'll ignore the Coherent that I installed on my beloved 286 in the late 80's). <snip> mark