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On Wed, Jun 19, 2024 at 2:56 AM <arnold@skeeve.com> wrote:

The "odd only" policy may be true, but it's not what I was told; I
was told that the policy was to release externally one version behind
what was being run internally.

That's how I remember Otis Wilson explaining it to us as commercial licensees at a licensing meeting in the early 1980s.

We had finally completed the PWB 3.0 license to replace the V7 commercial license (AT&T would rename this System III - but we knew it as PWB 3.) during the negociations Summit had already moved on to the next version - PWB 4.0. IMO: Otis was not ready to start that process again.

With the consent decree done and Divestiture in the works, AT&T was
going to be allowed get into the computer business.

Exactly, and Charlie Brown wanted to compete with IBM in particular—which was an issue—by the time of Judge Green, the microprocessor-based workstations had started to make huge inroads against the mini-computers. AT&T management (Brown et al), still equated the "computer business" with mainframes running Wall Street.

So at some point, someone decided that for System V, the current system would be released externally.

Right—that would have had to have been someone(s) in AT&T UNIX marketing in North Carolina—the folks that gave us the "Consider it Standard" campaign.

I doubt we'll ever know the exact truth.

I agree. I take a WAG, though. I >>suspect<< it was linked to the attempt to sell the 3B20S against the DEC Vax family and the then IBM model 140 (which was the "minicomputer" size IBM mainframe system). By that time, System V was the OS Summit had supplied for it. If there were going to be in the commercial hardware business, the OS SW had to match what the HW used.

Clem

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