My understanding is all the WE IP was retained through the
Alcatel-Lucent mergers and is now owned by Nokia. That would include
all the 3Bx systems and WE32k.
-A
On 2023-09-10 21:11, segaloco via TUHS wrote:
Hello folks, I'm here today with a question that
sprung off of some
3B20 research.
When 1984 happened and ATTIS rose from the ashes of former Bell System
computing efforts, presumably ATTIS received all IP rights from Western
Electric for 3B processors, WE32000, and so on, and continued to sell
related products through to the 3B2 line. Is this the case, is ATTIS
the formal recipient of both computing software *and* hardware IPs
after the breakup?
Given that, plus subsequent market flow, "old AT&T" scooped up and
paraded around in effigy by SBC, other old Bell stuff cannibalized by
other RBOCs, spinoffs of stuff to Novell, then Caldera/SCO on the other
side...who all wound up with the hardware IPs? The story as it
"concludes" concerning UNIX is of course tied up in all the subsequent
lawsuits, what with Novell and Caldera conflicts on ownership, transfer
to the Open Group, so on and so forth, and SCO and progeny wind up with
the Sys V "trunk."
Is there a clear, current owner of these WECo hardware IPs, or have
those waters grown even murkier than those of UNIX in the times after
AT&T proper?
Thanks everyone!
- Matt G.
P.S. As an aside (even though it's the more directly UNIX thing...) is
anything after SVR4 developments that would've involved the same folks
as were working up to that point in the USL group? Or did the transfer
of System V to Novell also involve their own in house folks starting to
take it over, then over to SCO, is there anything post SVR4 (4.2, 5,
UnixWare stuff) that would even remotely be considered the logical next
step by the same folks that engineered SVR4, or was it basically just
another face in the crowd of "UNIX <xyz>" when USL wasn't involved
anymore? Probably not the first time this has been asked either so to a
finer point I'm basically fishing for whether anything post the initial
SVR4 releases in the early 90s is generally considered "pure" in any
way or if the Bell streams pretty much terminate with Research V10 and
SVR4, (and IX) at the turn of the 90s.