[TUHS] PWB - what is the history?

[jnc@mercury.lcs.mit.edu (Noel Chiappa)]

    > From: Clem Cole

    > Programmer's Workbench - aka PWB was John Mashey and team in Whippany.
    > They took a V6 system and make some changes

I was suprised to find, reading the article on it in the Unix BSTJ issue, that
the system changes were less than I'd thought. Some of the stuff in the PWB1
release that we have (see previous message) is _not_ described in that article
(which is fairly detailed), which further compounds the lack of clarity over
who/what/when between V6 and V7.

    > Noel may know how it made it to MIT

That I _do_ know! There was some sort of Boy Scouts group at Bell (not sure
exactly where) and one of the members went to MIT. I think he was doing
undergraduate research work in the first group at MIT to have Unix (Steve
Ward's), but anyway he had some connection there; and I think also had a
summer job at Bell. He was the Bell->MIT conduit.

    > PWB 2.0 was released a few years later and was based on the UNIX/TS
    > kernel and some other changes and it was around this time that the UNIX
    > Support Group was formed

??? If PWB1 was in July '77, and PWB2 was some years later, USG couldn't have
been formed 'around [that] time' because there's that USG document from
January '76?

     Noel