Some more details below ... But I've pointed out elsewhere to be careful -- because the press did not always get it right. Plus, looking at some of the effects 50 years later without looking at the context and politics of the time is very dangerous (think about the old SNL skit where archeologists in hundreds of years later, open a sealed 1970s palm springs home and find Izod Shirts, an answering machine and old tuna sandwich and try to explain life 100 years before with just those items).
On Sat, Mar 11, 2023 at 6:12 AM Jonathan Gray <jsg@jsg.id.au> wrote:
That was commercially sold as a v7 port (in 1980) according to
That was the second license that I am aware Wollongong had. Remember that ISC and Wollongong received special V6 licenses (and maybe HCR - we'd have to check with Mike Tikson) - more in a minute.
ISC were selling products based on v6 and PWB in 1977:
"By June he had formed Interactive Systems Corp. in Santa Monica,
Calif., and had a license from Bell Labs to market Unix-based systems.
Yup, Peter got a special license shortly after Wollongong - Heinz as a founder/early person at ISC may know more of the details.
...
The company calls its enhanced Unix systems Interactive System/One.
Interactive System/Two is coming along. It too is based on a Bell Labs
development. This one, called Programmers Workbench (PWB), uses Unix
and makes it possible to develop software for large scale computers
using minis. Interactive has a license from Bell for PWB, similar to
the one it holds for Unix."
Again check with Heinz here - I do not believe that was actually able to be executed as the V7 redistribution license came into being. I'm not sure that I believe Datamation as gospel. I know they miss quoted/represented me and some of my friends a few times in those days.
It's possible that Peter Weiner and the ISC team may have had something special (like PWB1) - but Al Arms was getting really skittish at the time and trying to stop having one-off licenses. The AT&T legal team needed to demonstrate they were being 'fair and reasonable' [more in a minute].
So the background is this ...
1956 consent decree says AT&T and, in particular, their commercial sales arm, Western Electric, can not be in the commercial electronics (or later computer biz). In fact, this is why they drop out of the selling tubes to folks - so you see WE components in AT&T equipment but not in other places - and TI/RCA/GE, etc all become the primary transistor producers). I'm not sure how Teletype was an end-around - although they were originally selling equipment for the telegraph network. Since Teletype and Friden were already the big two players, and most people bought from them before 1947 for those styles of devices - there must have been some sort of ruling that the AT&T attorneys got in the late 1950s to allow that to continue as being part of the telephone/telegraph business and the computer folks were using their devices - not the other way round.
By the early/mid-1970s, AT&T was being investigated for monopoly by the US Justice Dept for the second time since 1947. This suit is very much the "Sword of Damocles" and all actions in the commercial world in the 1970s must recognize this suit is steering many of the choices/decisions by sr. AT&T managers. By the 1956 decree, AT&T is >>required<< to make licenses available from their IP to the research community and provide 'reasonable and fair terms' to people that want to use it commercially (again, think the transistor). So there is a patent and license team in MH set up to work on these "few" requests. If you look in the histories, Al Arms said they handled a few requests per year, maybe one a month.
UNIX appeared in the late 1960s/1970s, and the team started to publish papers about it which got folks like me interested. So ... the first UNIX licenses are for universities - (Lou Katz at Columbia is "user 0"). And Al starts to get "inundated with requests" for the research world. The first licenses were one-offs, but by the time V6 - they had a university license template for use. But in either case, the license says - "sure, go ahead and play with it, but don't ask us for help" (as we said at the time - AT&T/WE was "abandoned UNIX on your doorstep"). The UNIX IP ends up at Harvard and then some Harvard folks end up at Rand. Rand [a commercial entity] wants to use the IP - so the original license for researchers is insufficient.
The legal team AT&T in MH has a problem ... content decree says they can license it but can not "sell.". They write a special license for Rand (for the Fifth Edition, I think - but it may have 6th by then, and I never asked any of the Rand folks how much $s was exchanged). Shortly after that, a few other commercial folks appear (ISC, Wollogone being two), and the original Rand commercial license is more formalized for the 6th edition commercial license (a.k.a. in the order of $15K for the first CPU, 3K for the second/3rd, etc. IIRC - but that might be wrong). Remember, a PDP-11 large enough to run UNIX costs about $150-200K so 10% was considered "fair and reasonable").
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.
Time rolls forward and V7 gets released ... By now, there is now a larger group of commercial folks beginning to ask about redistribution (order 25-50). Again Al Arms legal team does not want a special for each, so they drew up the terms for the V7 commercial license. Which was $20K first CPU, $5K second or more, unless you had a binary redistribution license which was $150K for the >>rights<<, and then there was a sliding scale for the binaries that started at $1.5K. There were a bunch of other terms in that license that were problematic (which I've forgotten and no longer have a draft), but as I said, almost the moment Al Arms and the team announced the V7 commercial redistribution license - numerous firms were unhappy.
An important thing occurred ( check out https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/1658611 ), which is the IEEE 1978 Asilomar Workshop on Microprocessors - Stanford Professor Dennis Allison was the key organizer. I remember lots of the commercial folks at what we now call AMW, both thrilled and complaining about the fact that AT&T was working on a redistribution license. By the 1979 version of the AMW, the hue, and cry were getting loud. Remember that Prof. Allison was consulting for most of us in those days, and by December, he organized a meeting of about ten firms at Ricki's Hyatt and got Al Arms to come.
I don't remember the Wollongong folks being there [but they were likely invited], but I do remember Peter Weiner was there (as was Bill Gates and Bob Greenberg from Microsoft as well as Bob Metcalfe from his new start-up 3Com). But there were folks from HP, Tektronix, DEC, IBM, and smaller firms like ISC and SCO. Two things came out of that meeting -- one was we started to negotiate what would become the System III license and this also set the seeds for the creation of /usr/group (later called UNICOM) as USENIX/IEEE/ACM were not in a position (nor did any of them want to be) to try to be a commercial UNIX trade group.
So ... AT&T (via Al Arms) wanted one place to negotiate and in the open - so they could show the justice department that they were neither trying to be in the business (i.e., we were all coming to them) and were always treating everyone in the "market" the same - i.e. common license terms (post-Judge the later did not work out too well and we ended up with OSF / UI and the rest of the war).
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