[TUHS] Re: PWB 1.0 Distro and Licensing Timeframe

[Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com>]

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On Fri, Mar 10, 2023 at 2:51 PM segaloco via TUHS <tuhs@tuhs.org> wrote:

> Was there a particular "public release" date for PWB 1.0 or would it have
> just been whenever folks started getting tapes out of Bell?

No PWB 1.0, 2.0, and 4.0 were private to the Bell System ... however

The Bell OYOC (one year on campus) program meant that all the new BS hires,
spent the summer at their Bell Labs site, then were enrolled for a year at
one of the participating schools.  Many of the OYOCs brought things from
the labs to their schools - i.e. pieces of PWB 'leaked' from BTL to the
schools.

Remember, until the System III license, the only license was a research
system license.

The other really important piece is that the V7 redistribution license was
the first that allowed vendors to ship binaries, and this is all pre-Judge
Green.    The vendors started the negotiation for the replacement of the V7
license almost at day one [December 1979 was the first meeting at Ricki's
Hyatt - which I have described earlier].

PWB 3.0 was not yet released when the negotiation started but AT&T was
offering that technology, not what was in Research. By the time the new
license was agreed, AT&T Summit had already released PWB 4.0 inside of the
labs and Judge Green had done his thing.  Al Arms (AT&T's legal head) and
Otis Wilson (who was taking over the legal interface with us on the vendor
side), was afraid trying to switch to PWB 4.0 at that point would delay
things even more and the vendors were so upset wit the V7 terms (and they
all had their own private versions of UNIX by then), they did not want the
bits -- they wanted the new license terms.





> Also, was PWB held as something that would be "marketable" from the
> get-go,

No, Summit -- the Unix Support Group -- was originally to support UNIX for
the Bell System. Remember 1956 content decree -- AT&T can not "market"
anything.   They can support their own technologies for the operating
companies and other Labs.

As I said, yesterday -- PWB 1.0 (Piscataway) is set up >>before<< USG.
Mashey and team are running a UNIX based data center -- they are trying to
make what Ken and Dennis give then more 'bullet proof' because they care of
production users.
ᐧ

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