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A comment on The short, tormented life of computer genius Phil Katz (2000). Parent comment

Re:The short, tormented life of computer genius Phil Katz (2... by zznneezznnee on Saturday December 10, 2016 @09:58PM (#13149347)
I imagine it was just a product of UNIX/academia being somewhat isolated from the general public/BBS world. Before GNU/Linux basically nobody using PCs had access to UNIX-like systems, and probably wouldn't have known of tar's existence.

My older sibling exposed me to tar indirectly by granting me access to their university-provided dialup UNIX account where they ran `elm` for email access, and this happened long after I had been using BBSs for years with my PC.

Never saw a tar file in all my years of PC-based BBS usage. GNU/Linux and Freebsd are largely responsible for the general public accessing *NIX-like systems. BBSs (and their file sharing) were a thing before those existed.

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Re:The short, tormented life of computer genius Phil Katz (2... by JdeBP on Sunday December 11, 2016 @10:37AM (#13151464)
Actually, plenty of people had access to UNIX-like systems. There was XENIX, for example, described by some histories as "the most widely installed base of any Unix distribution" of its time.

XENIX is too often forgotten, as is the fact that the Unix world had its "archiver wars", too. In this case it was tar versus cpio, with the POSIX standardization effort settling on "pax", the pun in whose name is reportedly not a coincidence.

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Re:The short, tormented life of computer genius Phil Katz (2... by digi_owl on Sunday December 11, 2016 @09:11AM (#13151130)
The whole mainframe world was massively insular, and thus the micro/PC world basically had to invent gunpowder all over again. You can see it play out too this day.
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