Cisco says 90% of internet traffic goes through Erlang-controlled nodes

Re:Cisco says 90% of internet traffic goes through Erlang-co... by pjmlp on Monday June 04, 2018 @03:11AM (#17225293)

Those were the rules of the game back in those days, languages were tied to OS vendors.

UNIX and C only became widespread, because contrary to IBM, DEC, Wang, and many others, AT&T was forbidden to sell UNIX and they started offering it alongside source code for a symbolic price of $100, which was like being free given the prices of other systems.

In any case, that doesn't make C technically better than the alternatives outside AT&T walls, it was just cheaper to get hold of.

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Re:Cisco says 90% of internet traffic goes through Erlang-co... by skissane on Monday June 04, 2018 @03:57AM (#17225503)

The folks calling for IBM to release a PL/S compiler were not demanding IBM hand it out for free. They would have been satisfied by IBM offering it for sale on usual commercial terms, for a similar price to IBM's other compilers (PL/I, COBOL, FORTRAN, etc).

But IBM wasn't willing to sell its customers a PL/S compiler.

One reason was that (up until the OCO announcement in 1983) IBM gave its customers the PL/S source code, but not giving them a PL/S compiler discouraged customers from changing the source code, since they couldn't recompile it. Customer modifications had to be made in assembler, which was a lot harder to maintain.

Another reason was to make life harder for competing vendors selling IBM-compatible mainframes, such as Amdahl, Fujitsu and Hitachi.

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