19 Jun
2024
19 Jun
'24
4 p.m.
On 6/19/24 8:47 AM, Clem Cole wrote:
That's how I remember Otis Wilson explaining it
to us as commercial licensees at a licensing meeting in the early 1980s.
We had finally completed the PWB 3.0 license to replace the V7 commercial license
(AT&T would rename this System III - but we knew it as PWB
3.) during the negociations Summit had already moved on to the next version - PWB 4.0.
IMO: Otis was not ready to start that process again.
Is the really early history of Unix licensing documented anywhere?
The work on reviving a Plexus P20 prompted me to put up the history of Onyx and Plexus
at
http://bitsavers.org/pdf/plexus/history and a long time ago someone who worked at
Fortune
told me we can all thank Onyx in 1980 for working out the single machine licensing with
AT&T