NASA hired Cygnus (our first customer!) while we were figuring out how to do what we planned to do. The open source world would look quite different had they not!
We had a couple of key customers like that who hired us despite ourselves. NASA hired us and told us how to do our job. Intel hired us because they needed an alternate compiler to their official one for the i960 (they needed it to exist, it didn't have to work). We knew how to port gcc, gdb etc, but we didn't know how to do the job (i.e. send the reports and updates that a big corp needs). McGeedy flew down, read us the riot act and told us how to do our jobs.
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NASA hired Cygnus (our first customer!) while we were figuring out how to do what we planned to do. The open source world would look quite different had they not!
We had a couple of key customers like that who hired us despite ourselves. NASA hired us and told us how to do our job. Intel hired us because they needed an alternate compiler to their official one for the i960 (they needed it to exist, it didn't have to work). We knew how to port gcc, gdb etc, but we didn't know how to do the job (i.e. send the reports and updates that a big corp needs). McGeedy flew down, read us the riot act and told us how to do our jobs.
A few customers like that and we had it down pat.