15 Mar
2024
15 Mar
'24
1 p.m.
Another detail. There was lawyerly concern about the code being stolen, and
we (127) were asked to find ways to test, absent their source, whether they
had just stolen our source and built the binaries. It was soon concluded
that there were enough details different to definitively say that at least
most of the work was done in a clean room, as advertised, but the piece I
liked best is that their PPT(1) program (ASCII art showing a paper tape
rendering the argument text) did not include the original, and just
discovered, bug that mispunched, if I remember right, the letter 'R'.
-rob
On Fri, Mar 15, 2024 at 4:16 PM Heinz Lycklama <heinz(a)osta.com> wrote:
Interesting little history about Coherent. They were
one of a few companies building UNIX-like systems
from scratch without using UNIX source code in the
early 1980's. Robert Schwartz represented the Mark
Williams Company on the /usr/group standards
effort resulting in the /usr/group Standard in 1984.
Robert was very insistent that members of the
/usr/group standards group did not have to be
UNIX source licensees.
Heinz
On 3/14/2024 8:45 PM, Marc Rochkind wrote:
In another thread there's been some
discussion of Coherent. I just
came across this very detailed history, just posted last month.
There's much more to it than I knew.
https://www.abortretry.fail/p/the-mark-williams-company
Marc