Ken Thompson and Sean Dorward worked hard on PAC to get it ready for release. Our plan was to fill up the rest of the Plan 9 release CD with several hundred meg of PAC audio. I gathered together music from a number of famous musicians (I won't name drop here but you'd recognize them all), much of it recorded just for us. We were going to release the source code for the decoder and, in a compromise for the business people trying to sell to the broadcasting industry (they eventually succeeded; digital FM broadcasting is derived from PAC), only 386 binaries for the encoder, at least for the initial release. At the time the encoder only ran about 1/4 real time on a PC. Then an AT&T lawyer stepped in at the last minute, was deeply offensive and rude to us, and shut down the effort for completely stupid and invalid reasons. I still bristle at the memory. What an asshole. PAC was so much clearer sounding that MP3. The world would have been a happier place. If only. -rob On Thu, Jun 6, 2019 at 4:57 AM Dan Cross <crossd(a)gmail.com> wrote:

Lyndon Nerenberg writes: Ken talked about this at a conference that I attended a couple of decades ago. He had brought a whole pile of discs that he had made to give out before the idea was nixed by the attorney. Somehow audience members filched these discs while Ken was fiddling with his slides. No, I didn't end up getting one. So I don't know whether or not these included source code. Jon