From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: lm@mcvoy.com (Larry McVoy) Date: Tue, 21 Feb 2017 20:17:34 -0800 Subject: [TUHS] Mach for i386 / Mt Xinu or other In-Reply-To: References: <20170221120218.E07BA18C10B@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> Message-ID: <20170222041734.GP9439@mcvoy.com> On Tue, Feb 21, 2017 at 11:07:20PM -0500, Dan Cross wrote: > I can say from first-hand experience that it was NOT easy to get access to > Unix source code there. The cadre of university system administrators that > formed something of a cabal did not hand it out lightly, and it took > significant time to gain the sort of trust that would result in you getting > access to it. I strongly suspect that if a random CS student had written to > UCB asking for access to the BSD source code, and that had gotten back to > the aforementioned cabal, it would not have gone well for the student. Lots > of intrusive questions would have been asked; angry letters written and > placed into files. Uncomfortable meetings with academic advisors and the > university computer security officer would have taken place. Questions of > academic malfeasance or expulsion may have come up, etc. My experience at UWisc-Madison, during the time they were working on 4.3-Uwisc, matches Dan's pretty well. Yup, source was there. Access was restricted, you had to get a login on slovax, and you had to be "somebody" to get that login. I don't remember how I got access, I just knew I wanted it. So I probably just begged and eventually one of the admins took pity on me? Dunno. I don't think it was like what Clem says for most people. Clem went to CMU if I remember correctly, that puts him in a pretty elite class right there. I can easily imagine that the CMU CS department let all their students have access to the source if they wanted it. I don't think that was anywhere near as common as Clem thinks it was. My guess is that Clem interacted with a bunch of people who were his peers (aka pretty elite people) and all those guys had source access. Us unwashed masses had to work a lot harder to get it. Once 386BSD came out, yeah, source was easy. Not before. Even when I was at Sun the historic source was there, v7, 32v, etc., but you had to get past Shannon to get at it.