Z:gnu-www-ja-rms-nyu-2001-transcript--dad3e7-So, of course I had to decide/en

So, of course I had to decide what kind of operating system it should be. There are some technical design decisions to be made. I decided to make the system compatible with Unix for a number of reasons. First of all, I had just seen one operating system that I really loved become obsolete because it was written for one particular kind of computer. I didn't want that to happen again. We needed to have a portable system. Well, Unix was a portable system. So if I followed the design of Unix, I had a pretty good chance that I could make a system that would also be portable and workable. And furthermore, why [Tape unclear] be compatible with it in the details. The reason is, users hate incompatible changes. If I had just designed the system in my favorite way &mdash; which I would have loved doing, I'm sure &mdash; I would have produced something that was incompatible. You know, the details would be different. So, if I wrote the system, then the users would have said to me, &ldquo;Well, this is very nice, but it's incompatible. It will be too much work to switch. We can't afford that much trouble just to use your system instead of Unix, so we'll stay with Unix,&rdquo; they would have said.