NYCPHP Meetup

[James Wetterau]

"James Wetterau" says:
...> 
> In the case of K&R they were going for portability from early on so
> that they could easily move this large program they had written called
> "Unix" from one computer to another without having to rewrite huge
> chunks of it ever time.

Correction!  Sorry.  Only Dennis Ritche (not Brian Kernighan) was
involved in co-writing Unix at this point.  Of course his co-author
was one Ken Thompson.  However, all three worked at Bell Labs and
surely shared many common concerns and goals.

Some evidence exists that Ritchie thought about portability of both C
and Unix early.  Here's a web page linking to a paper on the issue:

http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/portpapers.html
"Papers about Unix Portability


 In 1976-1977 the Unix system was rendered portable, thus starting a
 continuing industry. The account by Steve Johnson and me,
 `Portability of C Programs and the UNIX System,' was published in the
 Bell System Technical Journal; it is now on-line as PDF, Postscript,
 or HTML formats."

Note the title talks about both C and Unix, pretty early on in the
life of the language.