9 Mar
2024
9 Mar
'24
7:52 p.m.
This is UNIX history, but since the Internet's history and Unix history are
so intertwined, I'm going to risk the wrath of the IH moderators to try to
explain, as I was one of the folks who was at the table in those the times
and participated in my small way in both events: the birth of the Internet
and the spreading of the UNIX IP.
More details can be found in a paper I did a few years ago:
https://technique-societe.cnam.fr/colloque-international-unix-en-france-et-…
[If you cannot find it and are interested send me email off list and I'll
forward it].
And ... if people want to continue this discussion -- please, please, move
it to the more appropriate COFF mailing list:
https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/coff - which I have CC'ed in
this reply.
On Fri, Mar 8, 2024 at 11:32 PM Greg Skinner via Internet-history <
internet-history(a)elists.isoc.org> wrote:
Forwarded for Barbara
Let me see if I can explain better ...
Assuming you were running BSD UNIX on a Vax, your team would have needed
two things:
- an AT&T License for 32/V [Research Version 7 -- port to a Vax/780 at
AT&T] and a
- a license for BSD 3, later 4, then 4.1, *etc*., from the Regents of
the University of CA.
The first license gave your team core a few rights from AT&T:
1. the right to run UNIX binaries on a single CPU (which was named in
your license)
2. the right to look at and modify the sources,
3. the right the create derivative works from the AT&T IP, and
4. the right to exchange your derivative works with others people that
held a similar license from AT&T.
[AT&T had been forced to allow this access (license) to their IP under the
rules of the 1956 consent decree - see paper for more details, but
remember, as part of the consent decree allow it to have a legal monopoly
on the phone system, AT&T had to make its IP available to the US Gov --
which I'm guessing the crux of Barbara's question/observation].
For not-for-profits (University/Research), a small fee was allowed to be
charged (order of 1-2 hundred $s) to process the paperwork and copy the mag
tape. But their IP came without any warranty, and you had to hold AT&T
harmless if you used it. In those days, we referred to this as *the UNIX IP
was abandoned on your doorstep.* BTW: This license allowed the research
sites to move AT&T derivative work (binaries) within their site freely.
Still, if you look at the license carefully, most had a restriction
(often/usually ignored at the universities) that the sources were supposed
to only be available on the original CPU named in their specific license.
Thus, if you were a University license, no fees were charged to run the
AT&T IP on other CPUs --> however, the licensees were not allowed to use it
for "commercial" users at the University [BTW: this clause was often
ignored, although a group of us at CMU hackers in the late 1970s famously
went on strike until the Unversity obtained at least one commercial
license]. The agreement was that a single CPU should be officially bound
for all commercial use for that institution. I am aware that Case-Western
got a similar license soon after CMU did (their folks found out about
the CMU strike/license). But I do not know if MIT, Standford, or UCB
officials came clean on that part and paid for a commercial license
(depending on the type of license, its cost was the order of $20K-25K for
the first CPU and an order of $7K-10K for each CPU afterward - each of
these "additional cpu' could also have the sources - but named in an
appendix for each license with AT&T). I believe that some of the larger
state schools like Penn State, Rutgers, Purdue, and UW started to follow
that practice by the time Unix started to spread around each campus.
That said, a different license for UNIX-based IP could be granted by the
Regents of the University of CA and managed by its 'Industrial
Laison's Office" at UCB (the 'IOL' - the same folks that brought
licenses
for tools like SPICE, SPLICE, MOTIS,* et al*). This license gave the holder
the right to examine and use the UCB's derivative works on anything as long
as you acknowledged that you got that from UCB and held the
Regents blameless [we often called this the 'dead-fish license' -- *you
could make a chip, make a computer, or even wrap dead-fish in it.* But you
had to say you started with something from the Regents, but they were not
to be blamed for what you did with it].
The Regents were exercising rights 3 and 4 from AT&T. Thus, a team who
wanted to obtain the Berkeley Software Distribution for UNIX (*a.k.a*. BSD)
needed to demonstrate that they held the appropriate license from AT&T
[send a copy of the signature page from your license to the ILO] before UCB
would release the bits. They also had a small processing fee to the IOL in
the order of $1K. [The original BSD is unnumbered, although most refer to
it today as 1BSD to differentiate it from later BSD releases for UNIX].
Before I go on, in those times, the standard way we operated was that you
needed to have a copy of someone else's signature page to share things. In
what would later become USENIX (truth here - I'm an ex-president of the
same), you could only get invited and come to a conference if you were
licensed from AT&T. That was not a big deal. We all knew each other.
FWIW: at different times in my career, I have had a hanging file in a
cabinet with a copy of the number of these pages from different folks, with
whom I would share mag tapes (remember this is pre-Internet, and many of
the folks using UNIX were not part of the ARPAnet).
However, the song has other verses that make this a little confusing.
If your team obtained a* commercial use license* from AT&T, they could
further obtain a *commercial redistribution license*. This was initially
granted for the Research Seventh Edition. It was later rewritten (with the
business terms changing each time) for what would eventually be called
System III[1], and then the different System V releases. The price of the
redistribution license for V7 was $150K, plus a sliding scale per CPU you
ran the AT&T IP, depending on the number of CPUs you needed. With this, the
single CPU for the source restriction was removed.
So ... if you had a redistribution license, you could also get a license
from the Regents, and as long as you obeyed their rules, you could sell a
copy of UNIX to run on any licensed target. Traditionally, hardware is
part of the same purchase when purchased from a firm like DEC, IBM,
Masscomp,* etc*. However, separate SW licenses were sold via firms such as
Microsoft and Mt. Xinu. The purchaser of *a binary license* from one of
those firms did not have the right to do anything but use the AT&T
derivative work. If your team had a binary licensee, you could not obtain
any of the BSD distributions until the so-called 'NET2" BSD release [and
I'm going to ignore the whole AT&T/BSDi/Regents case here as it is not
relevant to Barbara's question/comment].
So the question is, how did a DoD contractor, be it BBN, Ford Aerospace,
SRI, etc., originally get access to UNIX IP? Universities and traditional
research teams could get a research license. Commercial firms like DEC
needed a commercial licensee. Folks with DoD contracts were in a hazy
area. The original v5 commercial licensee was written for Rand, a DoD
contractor. However, as discussed here in the IH mailing list and
elsewhere, some places like BBN had access to the core UNIX IP as part of
their DoD contracts. I believe Ford Aerospace was working with AT&T
together as part of another US Gov project - which is how UNIX got there
originally (Ford Aero could use it for that project, but not the folks at
Ford Motors, for instance].
The point is, if you access the *IP indirectly* such as that, then
your site probably did not have a negotiated license with a signature page
to send to someone.
@Barbara, I can not say for sure, but if this was either a PDP-11 or a VAX
and you wanted one of the eBSDs, I guess/suspect that maybe your team was
dealing with an indirect path to AT&T licensing -- your site license might
have come from a US Gov contract, not directly. So trying to get a BSD tape
directly from the IOL might have been more difficult without a signature
page.
So, rolling back to the original. You get access to BSD sources, but you
had to demonstrate to the IOL folks in UCB's Cory Hall that you were
legally allowed access to the AT&T IP in source code form. That
demonstration was traditionally fulfilled with a xerographic copy of the
signature page for your institution, which the IOL kept on file. That
said, if you had legal access to the AT&T IP by indirect means, I do not
know how the IOL completed that check or what they needed to protect the
Regents.
Clem
1.] What would be called a System from a marketing standpoint was
originally developed as PWB 3.0. This was the system a number of firms,
including my own, were discussing with AT&T at the famous meetings at
'Ricky's Hyatt' during the price (re)negotiations after the original V7
redistribution license.
I will admit your response is confusing me. My
post only concerns what
I think I remember as a problem in getting BSD UNIX, in
particular the
source code. Nothing about getting something we wanted to use on a
hardware platform from one of the commercial vendors. We needed the BSD
source but got hung up.
10 Mar
10 Mar
3:24 a.m.
New subject: [ih] Fwd: Some Berkeley Unix history - too many PHDs per packet
Thanks Clem for those memories and details.
I only joined university in 1995, so my first collision with this whole copyright mess
was when we had to sign individually for our groups SunOS source code license according
to Sun's policies back then - but i don't think this was relating to AT. Of
course, both
ATT and BSD source code licenses where necessary for SunOS liceses back then. The
BSD requirement may have went away when Sun rebased to SVR4. Not sure.
I sometimes wonder what would have become of Linux if the whole CSRG/ATT lawsuit
would have settled before 1991. For us in University doing OS research, it was quite
annoying when we had all invested so much into SysV and BSD unix, but then our students
told us from 1991 on to just forget about it and founded or joined companies doing Linux
distributions (Suse being the local one from my universities metro area). Of course, in
hindsight,
this may have been a good thing, but of course, it took a long time for Linux to catch
up,
and i would not wonder if BSD die hards say that it still has not.
Cheers
Toerless
On Sat, Mar 09, 2024 at 02:52:28PM -0500, Clem Cole via Internet-history wrote:
This is UNIX history, but since the Internet's
history and Unix history are
so intertwined, I'm going to risk the wrath of the IH moderators to try to
explain, as I was one of the folks who was at the table in those the times
and participated in my small way in both events: the birth of the Internet
and the spreading of the UNIX IP.
More details can be found in a paper I did a few years ago:
https://technique-societe.cnam.fr/colloque-international-unix-en-france-et-…
[If you cannot find it and are interested send me email off list and I'll
forward it].
And ... if people want to continue this discussion -- please, please, move
it to the more appropriate COFF mailing list:
https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/coff - which I have CC'ed in
this reply.
On Fri, Mar 8, 2024 at 11:32 PM Greg Skinner via Internet-history <
internet-history(a)elists.isoc.org> wrote:
--
---
tte(a)cs.fau.de
Forwarded for Barbara
Let me see if I can explain better ...
Assuming you were running BSD UNIX on a Vax, your team would have needed
two things:
- an AT&T License for 32/V [Research Version 7 -- port to a Vax/780 at
AT&T] and a
- a license for BSD 3, later 4, then 4.1, *etc*., from the Regents of
the University of CA.
The first license gave your team core a few rights from AT&T:
1. the right to run UNIX binaries on a single CPU (which was named in
your license)
2. the right to look at and modify the sources,
3. the right the create derivative works from the AT&T IP, and
4. the right to exchange your derivative works with others people that
held a similar license from AT&T.
[AT&T had been forced to allow this access (license) to their IP under the
rules of the 1956 consent decree - see paper for more details, but
remember, as part of the consent decree allow it to have a legal monopoly
on the phone system, AT&T had to make its IP available to the US Gov --
which I'm guessing the crux of Barbara's question/observation].
For not-for-profits (University/Research), a small fee was allowed to be
charged (order of 1-2 hundred $s) to process the paperwork and copy the mag
tape. But their IP came without any warranty, and you had to hold AT&T
harmless if you used it. In those days, we referred to this as *the UNIX IP
was abandoned on your doorstep.* BTW: This license allowed the research
sites to move AT&T derivative work (binaries) within their site freely.
Still, if you look at the license carefully, most had a restriction
(often/usually ignored at the universities) that the sources were supposed
to only be available on the original CPU named in their specific license.
Thus, if you were a University license, no fees were charged to run the
AT&T IP on other CPUs --> however, the licensees were not allowed to use it
for "commercial" users at the University [BTW: this clause was often
ignored, although a group of us at CMU hackers in the late 1970s famously
went on strike until the Unversity obtained at least one commercial
license]. The agreement was that a single CPU should be officially bound
for all commercial use for that institution. I am aware that Case-Western
got a similar license soon after CMU did (their folks found out about
the CMU strike/license). But I do not know if MIT, Standford, or UCB
officials came clean on that part and paid for a commercial license
(depending on the type of license, its cost was the order of $20K-25K for
the first CPU and an order of $7K-10K for each CPU afterward - each of
these "additional cpu' could also have the sources - but named in an
appendix for each license with AT&T). I believe that some of the larger
state schools like Penn State, Rutgers, Purdue, and UW started to follow
that practice by the time Unix started to spread around each campus.
That said, a different license for UNIX-based IP could be granted by the
Regents of the University of CA and managed by its 'Industrial
Laison's Office" at UCB (the 'IOL' - the same folks that brought
licenses
for tools like SPICE, SPLICE, MOTIS,* et al*). This license gave the holder
the right to examine and use the UCB's derivative works on anything as long
as you acknowledged that you got that from UCB and held the
Regents blameless [we often called this the 'dead-fish license' -- *you
could make a chip, make a computer, or even wrap dead-fish in it.* But you
had to say you started with something from the Regents, but they were not
to be blamed for what you did with it].
The Regents were exercising rights 3 and 4 from AT&T. Thus, a team who
wanted to obtain the Berkeley Software Distribution for UNIX (*a.k.a*. BSD)
needed to demonstrate that they held the appropriate license from AT&T
[send a copy of the signature page from your license to the ILO] before UCB
would release the bits. They also had a small processing fee to the IOL in
the order of $1K. [The original BSD is unnumbered, although most refer to
it today as 1BSD to differentiate it from later BSD releases for UNIX].
Before I go on, in those times, the standard way we operated was that you
needed to have a copy of someone else's signature page to share things. In
what would later become USENIX (truth here - I'm an ex-president of the
same), you could only get invited and come to a conference if you were
licensed from AT&T. That was not a big deal. We all knew each other.
FWIW: at different times in my career, I have had a hanging file in a
cabinet with a copy of the number of these pages from different folks, with
whom I would share mag tapes (remember this is pre-Internet, and many of
the folks using UNIX were not part of the ARPAnet).
However, the song has other verses that make this a little confusing.
If your team obtained a* commercial use license* from AT&T, they could
further obtain a *commercial redistribution license*. This was initially
granted for the Research Seventh Edition. It was later rewritten (with the
business terms changing each time) for what would eventually be called
System III[1], and then the different System V releases. The price of the
redistribution license for V7 was $150K, plus a sliding scale per CPU you
ran the AT&T IP, depending on the number of CPUs you needed. With this, the
single CPU for the source restriction was removed.
So ... if you had a redistribution license, you could also get a license
from the Regents, and as long as you obeyed their rules, you could sell a
copy of UNIX to run on any licensed target. Traditionally, hardware is
part of the same purchase when purchased from a firm like DEC, IBM,
Masscomp,* etc*. However, separate SW licenses were sold via firms such as
Microsoft and Mt. Xinu. The purchaser of *a binary license* from one of
those firms did not have the right to do anything but use the AT&T
derivative work. If your team had a binary licensee, you could not obtain
any of the BSD distributions until the so-called 'NET2" BSD release [and
I'm going to ignore the whole AT&T/BSDi/Regents case here as it is not
relevant to Barbara's question/comment].
So the question is, how did a DoD contractor, be it BBN, Ford Aerospace,
SRI, etc., originally get access to UNIX IP? Universities and traditional
research teams could get a research license. Commercial firms like DEC
needed a commercial licensee. Folks with DoD contracts were in a hazy
area. The original v5 commercial licensee was written for Rand, a DoD
contractor. However, as discussed here in the IH mailing list and
elsewhere, some places like BBN had access to the core UNIX IP as part of
their DoD contracts. I believe Ford Aerospace was working with AT&T
together as part of another US Gov project - which is how UNIX got there
originally (Ford Aero could use it for that project, but not the folks at
Ford Motors, for instance].
The point is, if you access the *IP indirectly* such as that, then
your site probably did not have a negotiated license with a signature page
to send to someone.
@Barbara, I can not say for sure, but if this was either a PDP-11 or a VAX
and you wanted one of the eBSDs, I guess/suspect that maybe your team was
dealing with an indirect path to AT&T licensing -- your site license might
have come from a US Gov contract, not directly. So trying to get a BSD tape
directly from the IOL might have been more difficult without a signature
page.
So, rolling back to the original. You get access to BSD sources, but you
had to demonstrate to the IOL folks in UCB's Cory Hall that you were
legally allowed access to the AT&T IP in source code form. That
demonstration was traditionally fulfilled with a xerographic copy of the
signature page for your institution, which the IOL kept on file. That
said, if you had legal access to the AT&T IP by indirect means, I do not
know how the IOL completed that check or what they needed to protect the
Regents.
Clem
1.] What would be called a System from a marketing standpoint was
originally developed as PWB 3.0. This was the system a number of firms,
including my own, were discussing with AT&T at the famous meetings at
'Ricky's Hyatt' during the price (re)negotiations after the original V7
redistribution license.
--
Internet-history mailing list
Internet-history(a)elists.isoc.org
https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
I will admit your response is confusing me. My
post only concerns what
I think I remember as a problem in getting BSD UNIX, in particular the
source code. Nothing about getting something we wanted to use on a
hardware platform from one of the commercial vendors. We needed the BSD
source but got hung up.
6:02 p.m.
New subject: [ih] Fwd: Some Berkeley Unix history - too many PHDs per packet
At the U of Arizona, university lawyers would staple a page on the BSD contract that,
among other onerous things, required UCB to indemnify UA for all harms related to usage of
the software. A no-go, of course. Dr. Pete Downey discovered that we could run licenses
through Kitt Peak National Observatory, with offices on the UA campus. The KPNO lawyer had
the mindset of helping researchers do research, and our licensing problems were solved.
:)
--whm
10:05 a.m.
New subject: [ih] Fwd: Some Berkeley Unix history - too many PHDs per packet
On 10 Mar 2024, at 06:52, Clem Cole
<clemc(a)ccc.com> wrote:
That said, a different license for UNIX-based IP could be granted by the Regents of the
University of CA and managed by its 'Industrial Laison's Office" at UCB
(the 'IOL' - the same folks that brought licenses for tools like SPICE, SPLICE,
MOTIS, et al). This license gave the holder the right to examine and use the UCB's
derivative works on anything as long as you acknowledged that you got that from UCB and
held the Regents blameless [we often called this the 'dead-fish license' -- you
could make a chip, make a computer, or even wrap dead-fish in it. But you had to say you
started with something from the Regents, but they were not to be blamed for what you did
with it].
<snip>
Before I go on, in those times, the standard way we operated was that you needed to have
a copy of someone else's signature page to share things. In what would later become
USENIX (truth here - I'm an ex-president of the same), you could only get invited and
come to a conference if you were licensed from AT&T. That was not a big deal. We all
knew each other. FWIW: at different times in my career, I have had a hanging file in a
cabinet with a copy of the number of these pages from different folks, with whom I would
share mag tapes (remember this is pre-Internet, and many of the folks using UNIX were not
part of the ARPAnet).
However, the song has other verses that make this a little confusing.
<snip>
So the question is, how did a DoD contractor, be it BBN, Ford Aerospace, SRI, etc.,
originally get access to UNIX IP? Universities and traditional research teams could get a
research license. Commercial firms like DEC needed a commercial licensee. Folks with DoD
contracts were in a hazy area. The original v5 commercial licensee was written for
Rand, a DoD contractor. However, as discussed here in the IH mailing list and elsewhere,
some places like BBN had access to the core UNIX IP as part of their DoD contracts. I
believe Ford Aerospace was working with AT&T together as part of another US Gov
project - which is how UNIX got there originally (Ford Aero could use it for that project,
but not the folks at Ford Motors, for instance].
In the last while I’ve read about DARPA’s IPTO (Information Processing Technology Office)
1962-1986
and how they (generously) funded a very diverse range of projects for extended
durations.
Alan Kay comments that $1M was small beer to DARPA, who were investing billions in R&D
every year.
It was a boom time for US computing research - funders with vision, deep pockets and
patience :)
I can’t find my source now, nor any list of IPTO’s contracts given to UCB ( or given to
anyone ).
UCB - Berkeley - got many contracts, time-sharing / SDS-940, Ingres, TCP/IP in the Unix
kernel and RISC processing.
There was an IPTO director - Bob Taylor or Robert Kahn - that wanted a common development
platform with IP plus development tools,
who gave contracts to UCB’s CSRG to do the work.
This story implies DARPA helped arrange Unix licences with the many defence contractors,
albeit they only need binaries for BSD.
If the Internet Society’s ‘brief history’ is to be believed, Defence declared Unix a
’standard’ (for which work?) in 1980.
===================
DARPA’s short bio of IPTO. Doesn’t mention name change in 1986 to Information Processing
Technology Office (not ’Techniques’)
Information Processing Techniques Office
<https://www.darpa.mil/about-us/timeline/ipto>
DARPA’s Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO) was born in 1962 and for nearly 50
years was responsible for DARPA’s information technology programs.
===================
850K PDF, selected IPTO pages from DARPA report, includes charts of projects and total
budget - barely legible
<https://drive.google.com/file/d/1KnT1qPi37O4EKs8mLZ1fDHaIA4GiJvIm/view?usp=sharing>
DARPA technical accomplishments volume 3
an historical review of selected darpa projects
1991
<https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/ADA241680.pdf>
===================
<https://www.internetsociety.org/internet/history-internet/brief-history-internet/>
One of the more interesting challenges was the transition of the ARPANET host protocol
from NCP to TCP/IP as of January 1, 1983.
This was a “flag-day” style transition, requiring all hosts to convert simultaneously or
be left having to communicate via rather ad-hoc mechanisms.
This transition was carefully planned within the community over several years before it
actually took place and went surprisingly smoothly (but resulted in a distribution of
buttons saying “I survived the TCP/IP transition”).
TCP/IP was adopted as a defense standard three years earlier in 1980.
This enabled defense to begin sharing in the DARPA Internet technology base and led
directly to the eventual partitioning of the military and non- military communities.
By 1983, ARPANET was being used by a significant number of defense R&D and operational
organizations. The transition of ARPANET from NCP to TCP/IP permitted it to be split into
a MILNET supporting operational requirements and an ARPANET supporting research needs.
===================
In this 1988 oral history interview with Bob Khan, he talks about giving contracts to Bill
Joy / USB’s CSRC to port Unix to the VAX 11/780 and BBN’s TCP/IP into BSD.
Although a DEC package deal for VAX 11/750’s for Universities was mentioned (5 for $180k),
there’s no mention of licensing (easy for Research, not for Defence contractors)
page 42
<https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/2016/10/102717241-05-01-acc.pdf>
===================
Although ARPA has no definitive timeline or list of accomplishments for the IPTO, it
references others work.
<https://www.darpa.mil/about-us/timeline/mouse>
What Will Be (HarperCollins, 1997), author Michael Dertouzos credits DARPA with
“… between a third and a half of all the major innovations in computer science and
technology.”
===================
PDF of 2003 article from IEEE Annals of the History of Computing
J.C.R. Licklider’s Vision for the IPTO
<https://worrydream.com/refs/Kita_2003_-_J.C.R._Licklider%27s_Vision_for_the_IPTO.pdf>
Chigusa Ishikawa Kita, Kyoto University
The Information Processing Techniques Office of the Advanced Research Projects Agency was
founded in 1962
as a step toward realizing a flexible military command and control system.
In setting the IPTO’s research agenda for funding, its first director, J.C.R. Licklider,
emphasized the development of time-sharing systems.
This article looks at how Licklider’s early vision of “a network of thinking centers”
helped set the stage for the IPTO’s most famous project: the Arpanet.
===================
A partial list of DARPA Information processing projects. Omits the VLSI & RISC work.
Norberg is a co-author of the 1996 book, "Transforming Computer Technology.
Information Processing for the Pentagon, 1962-1986”
DARPA's IPTO had Formidable Reputation
Arthur L. Norberg, May 1997
<https://archive.cra.org/CRN/html/9705/research/aln.10_1_t.shtml>
===================
DARPA in the 1980s – Transformative Technology Development and Transition [ PDF, pg 15 ]
<https://www.darpa.mil/attachments/DARAPA60_publication-no-ads.pdf>
Parallel to DARPA’s transformational military programs in the 1970s and 1980s
were programs revolutionizing information technology, building on Licklider’s vision of
“man-computer symbiosis.”
DARPA’s research was foundational to computer science.
ARPANET was one element of a much broader, increasingly coherent program based on the
technological future that Licklider imagined.
He and his IPTO colleagues conceived a multi-pronged development of the technologies
underlying the transformation of information processing
from clunky, room- filling, inaccessible mainframe machines
to a ubiquitous network of interactive and personal computing capabilities.
This transformation continues today in DARPA’s pursuit of artificial intelligence,
cognitive (brain-like) computing, and robotics.
===================
DARPA and the Internet Revolution
By Mitch Waldrop
[ also author of ’The Dream Machine’ on Licklider’s career ]
<https://www.darpa.mil/attachments/(2O15)%20Global%20Nav%20-%20About%20Us%20-%20History%20-%20Resources%20-%2050th%20-%20Internet%20(Approved).pdf>
===================
Another partial list
<https://image.slideserve.com/635614/darpa-ipto-and-the-computing-revolution-n.jpg>
from:
<https://www.slideserve.com/channer/a-darpa-information-processing-technology-renaissance-developing-cognitive-systems>
DARPA/IPTO and the Computing Revolution
DARPA is credited with “between a third and a half of all the major innovations in
computer science and technology” – Michael Dertouzos, What Will Be (1997)
The information technology revolution of the second half of the 20th century was largely
driven by DARPA/IPTO (1962-1986)
* Time-sharing
* Interactive computing, personal computing
* ARPANET
* ILLIAC IV
* The Internet
J.C.R. Licklider (first IPTO Director) had the goal of human-computer symbiosis We now
have the opportunity to go back to the future (forward to the past?)
===================
--
Steve Jenkin, IT Systems and Design
0412 786 915 (+61 412 786 915)
PO Box 38, Kippax ACT 2615, AUSTRALIA
mailto:sjenkin@canb.auug.org.au http://members.tip.net.au/~sjenkin
7:58 p.m.
New subject: [ih] Fwd: Some Berkeley Unix history - too many PHDs per packet
below... [Dropping IH list].
On Sun, Mar 10, 2024 at 6:05 AM steve jenkin <sjenkin(a)canb.auug.org.au>
wrote:
I'm not sure if you are catching that the Regents IOL (Industrial
Laison's Office) [part of the UCB EE Department] and the DARPA’s IPTO
(Information Processing Technology Office) - which was originally part of
the US Air Force, then US DOD,* etc*.. [and went through a number of name
changes]. The latter group originally led and managed a small part of the
US Gov DOD projects. Its history is best spelled out in Katie Hafner's
wonderful book: "*Where Wizards Stay Up Late*" - ISBN 9780684832678. (More
in a minute).
The former, the IOL, managed the external relationships for the EE
Department (and later EECS when they created the CS division of EE). It
was set up initially in the latter part of the 1960s by my thesis advisor,
the late Donald O Pederson(*a.k.a.*dop) --- and, as I said, the folks that
brought you SPICE, SPLICE, and the like]. It already had a way to license
and distribute technology from EE to external organizations [using an idea
that would later be called 'open source.' He was famous for saying,
*"Unlike
our friends across the bay or on the east coast, we give everything away.
That way, I get to go in the back door and see what they are doing. If I
sell our tools, I use the front door like all salesmen."* The circa 1977
"Berkeley Software Distribution" for UNIX came from the IOL, as did other
distributions they had been managing since about 1967 or so.
On 10 Mar 2024, at 06:52, Clem Cole
<clemc(a)ccc.com> wrote:
That said, a different license for UNIX-based IP could be granted by the
Regents
of the University of CA and managed by its 'Industrial Laison's
Office" at UCB (the 'IOL' - the same folks that brought licenses for
tools
like SPICE, SPLICE, MOTIS, et al).
In the last while I’ve read about DARPA’s IPTO (Information Processing
Technology Office) 1962-1986
and how they (generously) funded a very diverse range of projects for
extended durations.
Alan Kay comments that $1M was small beer to DARPA, who were investing
billions in R&D every year.
Be careful. The US government, via DOD (and DOE), was funding billions,
while DARPA was a small and mostly forgotten backwater the USAF originally
had set up. As I said, see Katie Hafner's book for more details. $1M was a
big deal to DARPA. But compared to funding a new fighter or a new air craft
carrier, DARPA projects were small potatoes.
It was a boom time for US computing research - funders with vision, deep
pockets and patience :)
No, the boom was the Cold War and the space race. That was driving core
tech. CS Research just hitched its wagon to those engines. Things like
the ARPANet were funded to solve what the ARMY called the 'radar problem.:
How(during a nuclear strike) are you able to keep disparate command centers
informed and in sync?
I can’t find my source now, nor any list of IPTO’s contracts given to UCB
( or given to anyone ).
UCB - Berkeley - got many contracts, time-sharing / SDS-940, Ingres,
TCP/IP in the Unix kernel and RISC processing.
Yikes -- having lived it. I fear you may be confusing and mixing some
things up - certainly order, and what beget what. First, UCB was very late
to the DARPA world. Note that the first ARPAnet IMP semi-available to UCB
was at LBL (up the hill). And while the Regents ran LBL, LANL, Los
Almos, and the like (for DOE, mind you, not DOD). Furthermore by the time
of CSRG, CSRG did not have the contract for IP/TCP for UNIX -- BBN did. *CSRG
had a contract from DARPA to support the UNIX kernel.* These are the
sources of famous issues and questions WRT created. The concept of
sockets(2) was a CSRG [Bill Joy ism -- actually to counter Rashid's ports()
idea in Accent]. The IP stack (and support) *was supposed *to be from BBN
(and it originally was -- you can see at least one early BBN distribution
in the TUHS archives. BTW, Ingres was partially funded by DOD via DARPA
and predates CSRG by about 4 or 5 years. Fateman got a contract to move
MAXIMA from ITS to UNIX (and create Franz LISP). This was the origin of
the original kernel work. Frankly, I don't remember who funded that; but
I'm not sure it was DARPA. I think it may have been one of the national
labs (DOE) that was using Maxima. FWIW: the Ingres ARPAnet connection was
a 'very distant host' interface to one of the 4 ports on the LBL IMP.
I'm not sure who funded Patterson during the RISC work. I know my thesis
was funded by industrial folks as as well as DOE grant, not a DOD one.
I just thought of another interesting factiod. Mind you, the BSD sources
were free - which I'm sure caused a number of UNIX vendors to stop there
(per dop's genius of going in the back door) since BBN was a commercial
enterprise (and as such was looking for revenue streams ). The BBN stack
actually cost money for commercial firms. In the early 1990s, when we
decided to use it, not the UCB code, at Stellar, we had a get a sublicense
for it from BBN.
There was an IPTO director - Bob Taylor or Robert Kahn - that wanted a
common development platform with IP plus development tools,
who gave contracts to UCB’s CSRG to do the work.
Ouch ... that is not quite right. Again - get Katie's book.
CSRG is >>much much<< later in the DARPA (or Internet story). By the time
of CSRG, DARPA had moved inside of DOD a few times. It was not nearly the
size of the other teams, but it was a real line item. As Alan Kay said, it
was not even noticed when the original work started compared to other DOD
projects.
But the problem you are running into is that it was a multifold set of
problems - which are often hard to untangle. While I'm not sure how well
it worked in practice, the "justification" for the ARPAnet was to share
expensive resources owned by the USG and supplied to DOD/DOE contractors.
DOD and DOE were paying for lots of computing power at lots of places. DOE
used almost anything they could get their hands on - particularly in the
scientific processing area, but the CS Research types had started migrating
to the PDP-10 for their specific serious work. However, with the PDP-10,
there were N different OSs in use. DARPA knows it costs the >>USG<< less
if the users operated with a DEC-supplied SW stack, but their CS researcher
seems to do more projects with more enhanced OS. BBN has managed to get
DEC to pick up its own PDP-10 system and migrate the 'default' OS to be
based on theirs (FWIW: DEC is less impressed with ITS and WAITS in those
days for commercial reasons - I'm not going to go down that rathole). The
reader might try to remember that, as a general rule, DARPA and the rest of
the US government teams are trying not to fund what we might call "*core OS
Research."*
In 1983, DEC "discontinued" development and no longer offered for sale the
PDP-10 in favor of its now widely popular VAX series. DARPA switched to Vax
as the platform it will supply to its contractors (DOD and DOE, as well as
other depts, offered different systems). However, with the vax as a common
platform for the DARPA contractor, there was still a need for some system
extensions like ports/sockets for different research projects DARPA is
funding. The research community has started to switch to UNIX. But DARPA
is concerned about AT&T's "abandoning the OS on the doorstep" scheme.
So
the question was, how to get UNIX supported on Vax, Since the version of
UNIX being used on the VAX by >>much<< but not all of the DOD and DOE
community was BSD, DARPA's solution was let a contract to create a support
group - CSRG was born.
This story implies DARPA helped arrange Unix licences
with the many
defence contractors, albeit they only need binaries for BSD.
I did not imply that, nor do I think DARPA did. I think other parts of US
GOV did >>sometimes<< have access to the UNIX IP by means other than the
traditional license scheme from AT&T/WE Patent and Licensing group -- i.e.
Otis Wilson *et al *(we have evidence of the same). For instance, Ford Aero
was doing a joint project with AT&T for NASA [NASA is now an independent
agency, but I wonder if that was always true]. Ford Aero is known to have
had special access [and there seems to be evidence this was based on PWB
1.0 - which never was formally released outside of the Bell System]. There
have been other discussions that when other parts of Ford Motor wanted to
use UNIX, the Ford Aero folks were unable to help them.
We also know that Rand was an original (1960s) DARPA contractor [back to
its origin story as a research office inside the Air Force]. When the
folks from Harvard went to Rand and wanted to use UNIX, the first
commercial license was created by AT&T. And we know that story.
There is evidence that some US government contractors, such as BBN, were in
a grey zone. I'll try to get some enlightenment from some of the BBN UNIX
folks I know. From discussions, it >>seems<< like the first version of UNIX
made its way into BBN and was part of a US Gov contract, probably shared
with ATT. But by the time of CSRG, BBN definitely had traditionally
commercial source licenses. We also know that Ford became a traditional
licensee but started in a place different from others [particularly if the
reports of using PWB 1.0 were true -- that distribution was not available
from the AT&T/WE patent and license group].
If the Internet Society’s ‘brief history’ is to be
believed, Defence
declared Unix a ’standard’ (for which work?) in 1980.
Please be careful here. The IP based on the UNIX ideas was not a USG
standard for any department until FIPS-151 was published post IEEE P1003.1
- which was all in the 1980s. That said, there was often an *operational
standard *in many US government departments, including DOD, by the early
1980s; based on a preference for a flavor of UNIX by many users,
particularly researchers.
Furthermore, IP/TCP was the DOD's operational standard by the early 1980s,
but by the mid-1980s, DOD's DDN and DOC had picked ISO/OSI and GMAP
specifications over the IP family [and we all know how that played out in
the end]. A number of us in the industry at the time we scrambling how to
bring an ISO/OSI stack out on our products for the USG and the
Auto/Aerospace customers who were telling us they would not order equipment
without [and, of course, the folks in the EU were pushing X.25 and the rest
of ISO to counter IP's take off]. Metcalf's law would cause IP to win
out (i.e., economic reasons), but understand there is a difference between
an official standard and what was actually occurring.
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4 comments
4 participants
participants (4)
-
Clem Cole -
steve jenkin -
Toerless Eckert -
William H. Mitchell