1 Oct
2019
1 Oct
'19
11:56 a.m.
On Mon, Sep 30, 2019 at 11:00:44PM -0600, Warner Losh wrote:
Wikipedia :). It comes from our friend Warren:
Toomey, Warren (December 2011). [2]"The Strange Birth and Long Life of
Unix". [3]IEEE Spectrum. [4]IEEE. Retrieved December 15, 2012.
Maybe he can say...
Actually it comes from Salus' "A Quarter Century of Unix", pg. 139:
Lou Katz’s version is a bit different:
A large number of bug fixes was collected, and rather than
issue them one at a time, a collection tape (”The 50 fixes”)
was put together by Ken. Some of the fixes were quite important,
though I don't remember any in particular. I suspect
that a significant fraction of the fixes were actually done by
non-Bell people. Ken tried to send it out, but the lawyers kept
stalling and stalling and stalling.
Finally, in complete disgust, someone "found a tape on
Mountain Avenue” which had the fixes. [The address of Bell
Labs is 600 Mountain Avenue, Murray Hill, NJ.]
When the lawyers found out about it, they called every
licensee and threatened them with dire consequences if they
didn’t destroy the tape, after trying to find out how they got
the tape. I would guess that no one would actually tell them
how they came by the tape (I didn’t). It was the first of many
attempts by the lawyers to justify their existence and to kill
Unix.
Cheers, Warren
P.S In 2002 I wrote on the list:
The mythical `50 bugs' tape, described in Peter Salus' book `A Quarter
Century of UNIX' has been found lurking in the Unix Archive. You can
find it in Applications/Spencer_Tapes/unsw3.tar.gz as the file
usr/sys/v6unix/unix_changes.