BWK joke, BLIT(TTY 5620) BOF

[Peter Rowley]

Another USENIX tidbit, from the Tuesday night Software Tools session,
opening talk, by Brian Kernighan.  He started off with a slide containing
the answer to an exam question, taken from an OS class somewhere in the UK:

              "UN*X was written by a group of people at Digital
               Equipment Ltd. who left to form Bell Laboratories"

Another highlight was the Teletype 5620 (BLIT, sort of, for sale) BOF;
many marketing decisions have yet to be made regarding the selling of
UN*X compatible software for the machine and user input was requested.
Of the >40 people in the room, maybe 2 said they would buy the software
in binary form only-- my impression was that this changed a few minds
at Teletype (to quote a rep: "We hear you").  This largely typified the
constructive interaction between potential users, Bell Labs BLIT developers,
and Teletype reps at the BOF.
  However that decision goes, it appears that quite a bit of information
will be released on the internal architecture of the machine, including
a BELLMAC assembler manual.