4 May
2014
4 May
'14
9:20 a.m.
V6 ... on a number of machines at the Laboratory for
Computer
Science at MIT in the late 70s - early 80s
Interesting. I didn't realize that MIT had PDP-11 Unixes. When
university CS departments were snapping up licenses right and
left, MIT demurred because AT&T licensed it as a trade secret
and MIT's lawyers (probably rightly) feared there was no way
they could keep Unix knowledge from contaminating research
projects. Other places didn't worry about it, with John Lyons'
V6 book being the biggest leak. AT&T lawyers did clamp down
on general distribution of the book, but Bell Labs eagerly
hired Lyons for a sabbatical visit.
Did MIT's lawyers relent by V6 time, or did LCS somehow
circumvent them?
Doug
5 May
5 May
3:06 a.m.
New subject: TUHS Digest, Vol 112, Issue 1
On May 3, 2014, at 11:20 PM, Doug McIlroy <doug(a)cs.dartmouth.edu> wrote:
As I understood it, MIT’s main objection was that they didn’t
want to get entangled in anything that would require students
to sign non-disclosure agreements. At some point, MIT did have
a license with Western Electric that did not have such a requirement.
I’m pretty sure it was at least V7, and possibly 32V; not sure about V6.
The first UNIX system I used was on a PDP-11/44 running V7m from
DEC. It was at the MIT Center for Cognitive Science.
- Win
V6 ... on a
number of machines at the Laboratory for Computer
Science at MIT in the late 70s - early 80s
Interesting. I didn't realize that MIT had PDP-11 Unixes. When
university CS departments were snapping up licenses right and
left, MIT demurred because AT&T licensed it as a trade secret
and MIT's lawyers (probably rightly) feared there was no way
they could keep Unix knowledge from contaminating research
projects. Other places didn't worry about it, with John Lyons'
V6 book being the biggest leak. AT&T lawyers did clamp down
on general distribution of the book, but Bell Labs eagerly
hired Lyons for a sabbatical visit.
Did MIT's lawyers relent by V6 time, or did LCS somehow
circumvent them?
3885
days inactive
3885
days old
1 comments
2 participants
participants (2)
-
Doug McIlroy -
Win Treese