22 Feb
2017
22 Feb
'17
4:17 a.m.
On Tue, Feb 21, 2017 at 11:07:20PM -0500, Dan Cross wrote:
I can say from first-hand experience that it was NOT
easy to get access to
Unix source code there. The cadre of university system administrators that
formed something of a cabal did not hand it out lightly, and it took
significant time to gain the sort of trust that would result in you getting
access to it. I strongly suspect that if a random CS student had written to
UCB asking for access to the BSD source code, and that had gotten back to
the aforementioned cabal, it would not have gone well for the student. Lots
of intrusive questions would have been asked; angry letters written and
placed into files. Uncomfortable meetings with academic advisors and the
university computer security officer would have taken place. Questions of
academic malfeasance or expulsion may have come up, etc.
My experience at UWisc-Madison, during the time they were working on
4.3-Uwisc, matches Dan's pretty well. Yup, source was there. Access
was restricted, you had to get a login on slovax, and you had to be
"somebody" to get that login. I don't remember how I got access,
I just knew I wanted it. So I probably just begged and eventually
one of the admins took pity on me? Dunno.
I don't think it was like what Clem says for most people. Clem went
to CMU if I remember correctly, that puts him in a pretty elite class
right there. I can easily imagine that the CMU CS department let all
their students have access to the source if they wanted it. I don't
think that was anywhere near as common as Clem thinks it was. My guess
is that Clem interacted with a bunch of people who were his peers (aka
pretty elite people) and all those guys had source access. Us unwashed
masses had to work a lot harder to get it.
Once 386BSD came out, yeah, source was easy. Not before.
Even when I was at Sun the historic source was there, v7, 32v, etc., but
you had to get past Shannon to get at it.