> [a] case where AT&T attempted to see whether its Unix code had been stolen
> Coherent?
I doubt it. The only access to Coherent that I am aware of was Dennis's
site visit (recounted in Wikipedia, no less). Steve's Yacc adventure
probably concerned another company.
Besides the affairs of Coherent and Yacc, there was a guy in
Massachusetts who sold Unix-tool lookalikes; I don't remember his name.
We were suspicious and checked his binaries against our source--bingo!
At the same time, our patent lawyer happened to be negotiating
cross-licenses with DEC. DEC had engaged the very plagiarist as
an expert to support their claim that AT&T's pile of patents didn't
measure up to theirs. After a day of bargaining, our lawyer somehow
managed to bring casual conversation around to the topic of stolen
code and eventually offered the suspect a peek at a real example.
He readily agreed that the disassembled binary on the one hand must
have been compiled from the source code on the other. In a Perry
Mason moment, the lawyer pounced: "Would it surprise you if I told
you that this is ours and that is yours?"
The discredited expert didn't appear at next day's meeting.
The lawyer returned to Murray Hill aglow about his coup.
The product soon disappeared from the market.
Doug
On Tue, Mar 7, 2017 at 5:04 PM, Dave Horsfall <dave(a)horsfall.org> wrote:
> On Tue, 7 Mar 2017, Dan Cross wrote:
>
> > One or more microcomputer BBS (Bulletin Board System) platforms had UUCP
> > support to bridge their store-and-forward messaging networks to USENET
> > and send email, etc. The implementation I remember off the top of my
> > head was Waffle, written by Tom Dell. [...]
>
> Was this the UUCP that was available for CP/M? I found it on the old
> Walnut Creek CD, moved it over to my CP/M box via SneakerNet (I ran CP/M
> for years, carefully avoiding DOS/WinDoze) and it worked; it was overlaid
> to hell and back hence really slow, but it worked.
>
Maybe? Though I tend to doubt it. It looks like Waffle originally ran on
the Apple II, but was fairly quickly ported to DOS and then Unix/Xenix. I
believe it was written in C, but the source code is not generally
available. More information on it is here:
http://software.bbsdocumentary.com/IBM/DOS/WAFFLE/
As I mentioned before, the BBS thing was kind of interesting. What strikes
me, however, is how closely the timing lines up with developments in the
Unix world. As Jacob mentions earlier, UUCP was "published" in February
1978 and an improved version distributed with 7th Edition in October of
that year. The first BBS was announced via an article in the November 1978
edition of Byte magazine (available online, with some information here:
https://www.wired.com/2010/02/0216cbbs-first-bbs-bulletin-board/)
For those that don't know, the whole idea behind a BBS was that a person
with a computer (usually a microcomputer), a modem, and a POTS phone line
(usually into the person's house) would run software on the machine that
answered the phone when called (assumed the remote caller was using a
modem, of course) and presented the remote user with an interface for
interacting with the local machine: most often, this was menu based. Most
often, the BBS only had one phone line and the functionality was limited:
sending and receiving simple messages, uploading and downloading files
using protocols like x- y- and zmodem (or kermit!) and maybe playing
specially written games. However, some BBSs became quite sophisticated
supporting multiple lines, interactive chat, multiplayer games and so
forth. Early software was mostly homebrew (the Byte article talks about
software *and* hardware), but eventually packaged systems emerged. There
was even a commercial marketplace for BBS software.
Around 1984, they developed a messaging "network" called Fidonet for
routing email and sending files around; the goal was to minimize
long-distance telephone charges by relaying things through nodes in the
network that were geographically "close" to the next calling region and
transmitting things in batch. Think USENET (which predated it by several
years) but much smaller in scope.
The Internet killed it for the most part, of course, but these things
developed quite the following; some are even still running, though most are
now accessible via telnet/ssh. Somewhat confusingly, some of the operators
seem to think they are some kind of alternative to the "Internet" instead
of just another application of the net. It's sort of an odd viewpoint, but
I think it comes from not being altogether all that savvy: it was mostly a
hobbyist thing. But in the BBS heyday, there was something like 100,000 of
them in North America alone.
Sorry for the wall of text, but I think the parity between the rise of BBSs
and UUCP/USENET is interesting.
- Dan C.
Warren wrote:
> > I might call for participation
> > in a uucp/Usenet reconstruction with people running simulated nodes on
> > the Internet.
On Wed, Mar 08, 2017 at 07:47:30AM +0100, Lars Brinkhoff wrote:
> Are modern systems welcome? I always wanted a bang path address!
I can't see why not, as long as you can simulate a serial connection
with a TCP connection, and can speak uucp.
Cheers, Warren
This scanned version includes all the cited manuals:
A Research UNIX Reader
Annotated Excepts from the Programmer's Manual, 1971-1986
M. Douglas McIlroy
https://archive.org/details/a_research_unix_reader
> From: jnc(a)mercury.lcs.mit.edu <mailto:jnc@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> (Noel Chiappa)
>
>> From: Paul Ruizendaal
>
>> The "Research Unix Reader"
>
> Thanks for mentioning that; I'd never heard of it. Very interesting.
>
>
> A query: it seems to have been written with access to a set of manuals for the
> various early versions of Research Unix. The Unix Tree:
>
> http://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl <http://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl>
>
> has the manual pages for V3 and V4, and V6 and later, but not the other
> ones. Do the manuals used for the preparatio of that note still exist; and, if
> so, is there any chance of getting them scanned?
> From: Paul Ruizendaal
> The "Research Unix Reader"
Thanks for mentioning that; I'd never heard of it. Very interesting.
A query: it seems to have been written with access to a set of manuals for the
various early versions of Research Unix. The Unix Tree:
http://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl
has the manual pages for V3 and V4, and V6 and later, but not the other
ones. Do the manuals used for the preparatio of that note still exist; and, if
so, is there any chance of getting them scanned?
(I have a auto-page-feed scanner, and volunteer to do said scanning. Someone
else is going to have to do the OCR, and back-conversion to NROFF source,
though... :-)
Noel
I spent a year or so working on this in 1977. I was wondering who wrote it.
Funny but: I once had a compile fail on Motorola's MPL compiler, which was
written in fortran. It had so many continued comment lines that the 16-bit
column number went negative, and I got a fairly obscure error.
Anyone remember who wrote it?
Mid-year 2019 is the 50th anniversary of the creation of Unix and I've
been quietly agitating for something to be done to celebrate this. Up to
now, there's been little response.
The original Unix user's group, Usenix, will hold its Annual Technical
Conference on the west coast of the US at this time, so it would make sense
to do something in conjunction with this conference. Some suggestions:
- a terminal room with a bunch of period terminals: ASR-33s, -37s, VT100s,
VT102s, VT220s
- these connected to real/emulated Unix systems either locally or via a
terminal server and telnet to remotely emulated systems
- some graphical terminals: Sun pizza boxes, a Blit would be great
- if possible, some actual real PDP-11s, VAXen
- emulated systems: V1 to V7 Unix, 32V, the BSDs etc. In fact there are
plenty of Unix versions that we could run in emulated mode.
- Unix of course was one of the systems used to implement the Arpanet
protcols, so it would be interesting to get some of the real/emulated
systems networked together
- how about an emulated UUCP network with Usenet on top of it, and
some mail/news clients on the emulated systems.
- retro workshops/tutorials: how to edit with ed, using nroff, posting
a Usenet article, dealing with bang paths.
I'm proposing to gather a bunch of people to start the ball rolling on the
technical/demonstration side. We'd need people:
- with terminals, portable PDP-11s and VAXen, Sun boxen
- prepared to set up emulated systems
- who can help bring the networking (UUCP, Usenet, Arpanet) back to life
- willing to write and run workshops that show off this old technology
- to help set up terminal servers and all the RS-232 to telnet stuff
Some of this we can start doing now, e.g. rebuild an emulated Arpanet, UUCP,
Usenet, get emulated systems up, build front-end telnet interfaces.
Is there anybody willing to sign up for this? I think once we have some
momentum, we can tell the Usenix people and get some buy-in from them.
Post back and/or e-mail me if you can help. Thanks, Warren
It's not really Unix history, but Dartmouth's "communication files"
have so often been cited as pipes before Unix, that you may like
to know what this fascinating facility actually was. See
http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~doug/DTSS/commfiles.pdf