12 Mar
2023
12 Mar
'23
7:44 a.m.
On Sat, Mar 11, 2023 at 11:40:54AM -0500, Clem Cole wrote:
On Sat, Mar 11, 2023 at 6:12 AM Jonathan Gray
<jsg(a)jsg.id.au> wrote:
The Wollongong Group (TWG) were formed in 1980. The special v6 license
you refer to was for the university?
The university got permission from Western Electric to send their v6
port to the University of Illinois (January 1978) and the University of
Melbourne (March 1978) according to the Juris Reinfelds paper.
"By 1980 we had shipped about thirty systems to all parts of the world."
"Professor J. Reinfelds of the University of Wollongong visited Professor
C. William Gear of the University of Illinois at Urbana and
Dr M. D. McIlroy of Bell Telephone Laboratories, Murray Hill,
New Jersey, from 27 January to 4 March 1979 to develop the portability
of the UNIX time-sharing operating system."
Australia. Department of Science and the Environment.
Annual report, no.349 of 1979, 1979-06-30, p.130
https://trove.nla.gov.au/work/239318564
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.
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").
A $20k price for commercial use is mentioned by Bill Mayhew then of
the Boston Children's Museum in
https://archive.org/details/1975-03-peoples-computer-company/page/10/mode/2…
"There are now more than 70 UNIX installations within and outside the
Bell System. Some representative non-Bell users include Columbia
University; the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry; Harvard
University; and the Boston Children’s Museum, the first licensed
non-Bell users."
https://www.usenix.org/system/files/login/articles/login_apr15_16_unix_news…
"UNIX at the Children’s Museum has been fully operational since
August, 1974. Development work jointly with Harvard University began the
previous winter, making us one of the first non-Bell users"
Bill Mayhew recounted this in
https://www.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/2002-November/002217.html
Thanks for describing the meeting with Al Arms and related background.