[TUHS] Re: PWB 1.0 Distro and Licensing Timeframe

On Sat, Mar 11, 2023 at 9:41 AM Clem Cole <clemc(a)ccc.com> wrote: I have never figured out who was first (Peter Weiner at ISC or the folks at Wollongong) or the amount of the fees involved, but at some point, both managed to negotiate a special license to redistribute UNIX in some manner. My memory is that the commercial target had to get some sort of license from AT&T first. My memory of the ISC product was it was the source for your 11/70 [factiod - the Motorola guys were using it for what would eventually become the 68000 - Les Crudele told me they had source]. I also remember that when later Wollongong Vax products appeared, sources were available, but I've forgotten the details - I was never a customer -- Warner might know more here. Here's what I know about TWG's products. It's tangentially related to unix, and a bit rambly... After the original Unix port from Wollongong, they branched out. They knew they couldn't compete with Berkeley sending out tapes from the early 1980s, so they pursued two niche markets. They got into two niche markets. They used their Unix license to sell Eunice, which had been developed at Stanford by David Kashtan. He took BSD Unix and managed to get enough of the kernel to run as a process (and some device drivers?) under VMS. I don't know if he started with 4.2 or redid the work later with 4.2, but that added networking to the VAX, which DEC didn't have at the time. TWG marketed Eunice for a pretty penny. The emulation wasn't very complete (though many things just worked) owing mostly to the mismatch between the VMS process model being super heavyweight and Unix's fork/exec being lightweight. Plus, the pipe device driver never quite got to complete compatibility (it lacked the ability to pass fd credentials from process to process, for example). So it was kinda a mess. Source code was available, but hella expensive and it was only available so that TWG could sell into the government market that required it. TWG's So, v7 was kinda dead, and Eunice was a super-niche thing from the get go, what did TWG do? Networking. They separated (poorly, imho, but more ports better than one good port) the networking part of enuice from the rest and marketed that as a product. It was a total hack job, but for a product in high demand. That experience, and their relationship with Bell Labs meant they ported the networking code to System III and newer machines and marketed it to all of those (so we had several 3Bx systems around running System Vr2 and newer, though we had some machine that was system III nominally, though i don't recall those details, but Sony NEWS, SunOS, Sun road runner, HP running unix and non-unix, IBM maybe and a lot of others were in the QA lab). My rather simple .cshrc and similar files date from this time period since we had NFS running on all (many) of them. They also purchased IP/TCP or hired someone whose name I should remember but don't to make it good. He optimized the heck out of it to turn it into their software to compete with FTP Software's offering. Source wasn't available for any of this. They were going for quantity of ports, not quality of any individual one. They also had an ISO stack that they sunk a bunch of money into (port of BSD's to System V), but that didn't go anywhere... The quality issues is why TGV got started. I have a vague memory that David Kashtan went to SRI and redid networking for VMS right and spun out TGV so there was a lot of bad blood between TWG and TGV. Multinet was cool because it could plug in ISO protocols too, and was a native VMS thing with only the TCP stack itself being BSD code. It's integration into VMS was quite good, and they did better at benchmarks than TWG. I have friends still that used to work there if people are interested in fact checking my maybe not so great memory here... I only ever logged into Eunice once or twice. I did a lot of work with TWG's VMS TCP/IP product in college and went to work for them afterwards back when I thought VMS would win over Unix (silly me). Warner