From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
From: norman@oclsc.org (Norman Wilson)
Date: Wed, 05 Apr 2017 12:08:49 -0400
Subject: [TUHS] Ninth Edition incomplete?
Message-ID: <1491408534.24420.for-standards-violators@oclsc.org>

Joerg Schilling:

  BTW: UNOS has been sold to real customers from it's beginning. Was UNIX V8 
  available outside AT&T?

=====

I'm not sure what that has to do with anything.  Which
of your body parts is so small as to make you insecure,
and which UNIX distributions are your body parts drawn
from?

To answer the question seriously, though: as I think I've
already explained here, Eighth Edition UNIX was available
under special per-site licensing (a letter agreement) to
educational institutions.  I'm not sure what the official
criterion was: I helped make the tape, but wasn't involved
in the paperwork.  I believe the total was about a dozen
places.  A few of them did interesting work with the
system that was published e.g. at USENIX conferences
(Princeton comes to mind), but most I think never even
booted the system up.  By then there were other members
of the UNIX family that were more comfortable for general
use, and people were more interested in the ideas than
in the code.

And of course we were a research group.  We weren't making
things for customers.  We were sharing our work, to the
extent the laywers and our own limited resources allowed.

That was the last time the Computing Science Research
Center attempted anything like a formal distribution.
Any `distributions' after that are just snapshots of
a constantly-evolving system.

Norman Wilson
Toronto ON
(Body parts not available on github.  Sorry.)