4 May
2014
4 May
'14
9:20 a.m.
V6 ... on a number of machines at the Laboratory for
Computer
Science at MIT in the late 70s - early 80s
Interesting. I didn't realize that MIT had PDP-11 Unixes. When
university CS departments were snapping up licenses right and
left, MIT demurred because AT&T licensed it as a trade secret
and MIT's lawyers (probably rightly) feared there was no way
they could keep Unix knowledge from contaminating research
projects. Other places didn't worry about it, with John Lyons'
V6 book being the biggest leak. AT&T lawyers did clamp down
on general distribution of the book, but Bell Labs eagerly
hired Lyons for a sabbatical visit.
Did MIT's lawyers relent by V6 time, or did LCS somehow
circumvent them?
Doug