Re: [TUHS] System Economics

Sorry, this is something I know nothing of; it must have happened while I was still an early undergrad. The first Unix I knew of at MIT was the one in the DSSR/RTS group in LCS, which arrived (I think) roughly around the start of my sophmore year (so early '76 or so) - I have a memory of one of my friends (who was an undergrad working in that group) telling me about it, and showing it to me. (I remember being totally blown away with the way you could write a command 'foo', compile it, and jut say 'foo' to run it...) Actually, it may have shown up well before that - perhaps they had it well before I first saw it. Certainly by the time I showed up at LCS (fall of '77) it had already spread to CSR; they had an 11/40 with Unix on it, cloned from the DSSR system. Again, I don't know if there was any paperwork that had to happen, or if that system was already covered under whatever license the DSSR machine was under. Of course, this was all DARPA-funded work, and there may have been something there that allowed it. We certainly passed Unix source around with other DARPA projects (e.g. at BBN) without, AFAICR, worrying much about paperwork. I don't recall anything like that at MIT; maybe in the very early days, there was something, but certainly not by '77. If it's important to know what happened, I can ask (e.g. Prof. Ward, head of DSSR). Noel