On Tue, May 15, 2018 at 10:59 AM, Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:

So what's the back story with PWB? It seems like sort of a back water
but as I recall, they had some interesting stuff.

Actually PWB (1.0) gave on you of your favorite tools -- SCCS ;-)

V6 was semi-widely distributed to the Academics. Basically the tier-1 CS schools all had it, but it was probably few than 50-75 licenses. It was also were the first commercial use license was written (originally for Rand Corp).

Programmer's Workbench - aka PWB was John Mashey and team in Whippany. They took a V6 system and make some changes, primarily in how groups worked and added a bunch of user level tools that made it easier to write and maintain long term commercial software that was being sent out the Bell Operating Companies -- IIRC the #5ESS project was a big driver but I'm less sure of that.

PWB was not officially released to the Universities it was originally only available inside the Bell System, but because of the commerical use license AT&T started to rethink. BTW: some of the University got it from AT&T employees that brought it with them. This was how SCCS made it to UCB because it was not part of the research editions. Who brought it, there I never knew. Noel may know how it made it to MIT, it came to CMU from Phill Karn and Ted Kowalski.

PWB 2.0 was released a few years later and was based on the UNIX/TS kernel and some other changes and it was around this time that the UNIX Support Group was formed in Summit, where aps, Ted, and Steve Johnson spent time. This got even less widely used outside of the Bell System because V7 had been released which also based on the UNIX/TS kernel. I believe that this was released via Summit, but Steve or aps may know more.

With V7 there also came the first commercial binary redistribution license, and commercial use license was modified for the first time.

Judge Green broke the Bell System up....

So, AT&T started to negotiate with 10 commercial firms that had redistribution licenses and we also customers of Prof Allison at Stanford who brokered the meetings [I was the technical rep from Tektronix, along with a lawyer]. I'm not sure I can remember everyone in the room at Ricki's Hyatt. But Gates was there from Microsoft (only time I ever met him), Bill Munson from DEC, I've forgotten the HP and IBM reps, 3Com was Metcalfe, was SCO and few others. I can see a picture of the faces in my mind, I just can not remember the names]. What I remember was Gates saying 'You guys don't get it. The only thing that matters for SW is Volume' -- they wanted to pay $25 a copy max and DEC/IBM/HP thought $1500-2000 was just fine, since their average systems cost was $150K.

So ... PWB 3.0 came about 2-3 years later and Research was supposed to be out of the distribution business and the new commercial license was created from that negotiation. AT&T is allowed to be in the computer business and renamed it System III. But if you look at the printed manual, it had already been created and calls it PWB 3.0.

Clem

PS learn, style and diction were part of 7th edition BTW...