[TUHS] PWB 1.0 Distro and Licensing Timeframe

[TUHS] PWB 1.0 Distro and Licensing Timeframe

[segaloco via TUHS]

Hello folks, posing a question here that will help with some timelining.

So System III, according to everything I've read, was commercially issued in 1982.  However, PWB 3.0 was issued internally in 1980, two years prior.  This isn't that surprising, give USL some time to work it up for commercial-readiness.

Where I'm curious is if there was a similar gap for the public release of PWB, given that was earlier on and pre-support and such.  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?  I know it shows up in a price sheet floating around from say 1983 or 1984 among the likes of V7, 32V, System III, and System V also for sale, but would anything that early have had a formal "ship date" indicating a day they cut the master to copy tapes from or was it more of a contact Bell, someone will cut you a tape of whatever we've got right now?

Also, was PWB held as something that would be "marketable" from the get-go, or was it more of a happy accident that it wound up in the right place in the right time to become the commercial line?  One would think USG Generic would be the one they'd shoot for being the "base" to build on, but everything I'm finding in my study of System III lately is pointing to a much more PWB-ish lineage with random borrowings from CB, PY, HO, IH, among others.

- Matt G.

[TUHS] Re: PWB 1.0 Distro and Licensing Timeframe

[Clem Cole]

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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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[TUHS] Re: PWB 1.0 Distro and Licensing Timeframe

[Warner Losh]

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On Fri, Mar 10, 2023, 2:07 PM Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com> wrote:

> 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].
>

How did The Wollongong Group sell/send out the Interdata/Harris Unix Level
6 binaries then? Or did they get some kind of special since they bought the
rights from Wollongong University?

Warner

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[TUHS] Re: PWB 1.0 Distro and Licensing Timeframe

[Clem Cole]

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On Fri, Mar 10, 2023 at 4:24 PM Warner Losh <imp@bsdimp.com> wrote:

> How did The Wollongong Group sell/send out the Interdata/Harris Unix Level
> 6 binaries then? Or did they get some kind of special since they bought the
> rights from Wollongong University?
>
It was a special and a big mess and had a lot folks in AT&T legal
concerned - particularly because at the time, they were being investigated
by the US Justice Dept. But it was what forced the creation of the general
V7 redistribution license (and the crappy terms associated with it).
 That was part of the solution - make sure anyone could get such a license
- but like the original research >use<< licenses AT&T made it clear that
were NOT marketing UNIX and it was NOT in the computer business. Each
vendor was on his/her own.




ᐧ

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[TUHS] Re: PWB 1.0 Distro and Licensing Timeframe

[Jonathan Gray]

On Fri, Mar 10, 2023 at 01:24:26PM -0800, Warner Losh wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 10, 2023, 2:07 PM Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com> wrote:
> 
> > 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].
> >
> 
> How did The Wollongong Group sell/send out the Interdata/Harris Unix Level
> 6 binaries then? Or did they get some kind of special since they bought the
> rights from Wollongong University?

That was commercially sold as a v7 port (in 1980) according to
Juris Reinfelds in
tuhs/Distributions/Other/Interdata/uow103747.pdf
"Price includes a binary license"
https://archive.org/details/login_october-1980/page/11/mode/2up

Human Computing Resources (HCR), were somewhat related to the University
of Toronto's Dynamic Graphics Project.  HCR first sold Xenix and later
UNITY?  Richard Miller worked at HCR and was involved with their port to
the NS16032 after the Interdata port
https://archive.org/details/1983-proceedings-unicom-san-diego/page/269/mode/2up

ISC were selling products based on v6 and PWB in 1977:
"By June he had formed Interactive Systems Corp. in Santa Monica,
Calif., and had a license from Bell Labs to market Unix-based systems.
...
The company calls its enhanced Unix systems Interactive System/One.
Interactive System/Two is coming along. It too is based on a Bell Labs
development.  This one, called Programmers Workbench (PWB), uses Unix
and makes it possible to develop software for large scale computers
using minis. Interactive has a license from Bell for PWB, similar to
the one it holds for Unix."
Datamation, November 1977, pg 189
https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_datamation_42830601/page/n179/mode/2up

[TUHS] Re: PWB 1.0 Distro and Licensing Timeframe

[Clem Cole]

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Some more details below ...  But I've pointed out elsewhere to be careful
-- because the press did not always get it right.  Plus, looking at some of
the effects 50 years later without looking at the context and politics of
the time is very dangerous (think about the old SNL skit where
archeologists in hundreds of years later, open a sealed 1970s palm springs
home and find Izod Shirts, an answering machine and old tuna sandwich and
try to explain life 100 years before with just those items).

On Sat, Mar 11, 2023 at 6:12 AM Jonathan Gray <jsg@jsg.id.au> wrote:

>
> That was commercially sold as a v7 port (in 1980) according to
>
> That was the second license that I am aware Wollongong had. Remember
that ISC and Wollongong received special V6 licenses (and maybe HCR - we'd
have to check with Mike Tikson) - more in a minute.

>
> ISC were selling products based on v6 and PWB in 1977:
> "By June he had formed Interactive Systems Corp. in Santa Monica,
> Calif., and had a license from Bell Labs to market Unix-based systems.
>
Yup, Peter got a special license shortly after Wollongong - Heinz as a
founder/early person at ISC may know more of the details.

> ...
> The company calls its enhanced Unix systems Interactive System/One.
> Interactive System/Two is coming along. It too is based on a Bell Labs
> development.  This one, called Programmers Workbench (PWB), uses Unix
> and makes it possible to develop software for large scale computers
> using minis. Interactive has a license from Bell for PWB, similar to
> the one it holds for Unix."
>
Again check with Heinz here - I do not believe that was actually able to be
executed as the V7 redistribution license came into being. I'm not sure
that I believe Datamation as gospel. I know they miss quoted/represented me
and some of my friends a few times in those days.

It's possible that Peter Weiner and the ISC team may have had something
special (like PWB1) - but Al Arms was getting really skittish at the time
and trying to stop having one-off licenses. The AT&T legal team needed to
demonstrate they were being 'fair and reasonable' [more in a minute].

So the background is this ...

1956 consent decree says AT&T and, in particular, their commercial sales
arm, Western Electric, can not be in the commercial electronics (or later
computer biz).    In fact, this is why they drop out of the selling tubes
to folks - so you see WE components in AT&T equipment but not in other
places - and TI/RCA/GE, *etc* all become the primary transistor
producers).   I'm not sure how Teletype was an end-around - although they
were originally selling equipment for the telegraph network.  Since
Teletype and Friden were already the big two players, and most people
bought from them before 1947 for those styles of devices - there must have
been some sort of ruling that the AT&T attorneys got in the late 1950s to
allow that to continue as being part of the telephone/telegraph business
and the computer folks were using their devices - not the other way round.

By the early/mid-1970s, AT&T was being investigated for monopoly by the US
Justice Dept for the second time since 1947.  This suit is very much the
"Sword of Damocles" and all actions in the commercial world in the 1970s
must recognize this suit is steering many of the choices/decisions by sr.
AT&T managers.  By the 1956 decree,  AT&T is >>required<< to make licenses
 available from their IP to the research community and provide 'reasonable
and fair terms' to people that want to use it commercially (again, think
the transistor).  So there is a patent and license team in MH set up to
work on these "few" requests.  If you look in the histories, Al Arms said
they handled a few requests per year, maybe one a month.

UNIX appeared in the late 1960s/1970s, and the team started to publish
papers about it which got folks like me interested.  So ... the first UNIX
licenses are for universities - (Lou Katz at Columbia is "user 0"). And Al
starts to get "inundated with requests" for the research world.    The
first licenses were one-offs, but by the time V6 - they had a university
license template for use. But in either case, the license says - "sure, go
ahead and play with it, but don't ask us for help"  (as we said at the time
- AT&T/WE was "abandoned UNIX on your doorstep"). The UNIX IP ends up at
Harvard and then some Harvard folks end up at Rand.       Rand  [a
commercial entity] wants to use the IP - so the original license for
researchers is insufficient.

The legal team AT&T in MH has a problem ... content decree says they can
license it but can not "sell.".  They write a special license for Rand (for
the Fifth Edition, I think - but it may have 6th by then, and I never asked
any of the Rand folks how much $s was exchanged).    Shortly after that, a
few other commercial folks appear (ISC, Wollogone being two), and the
original Rand commercial license is more formalized for the 6th edition
commercial license (*a.k.a.* in the order of $15K for the first CPU, 3K for
the second/3rd, *etc*. IIRC - but that might be wrong).    Remember, a
PDP-11 large enough to run UNIX costs about $150-200K so 10% was considered
"fair and reasonable").

I have never figured out who was first (Peter Weiner at ISC or the folks at
Wollongong) or the amount of the fees involved, but at some point, both
managed to negotiate a special license to redistribute UNIX in some manner.
My memory is that the commercial target had to get some sort of license
from AT&T first. My memory of the ISC product was it was the source for
your 11/70 [factiod - the Motorola guys were using it for what would
eventually become the 68000 - Les Crudele told me they had source].  I also
remember that when later Wollongong Vax products appeared, sources were
available, but I've forgotten the details - I was never a customer --
Warner might know more here.

Time rolls forward and V7 gets released ...  By now, there is now a larger
group of commercial folks beginning to ask about redistribution (order
25-50).  Again Al Arms legal team does not want a special for each, so they
drew up the terms for the V7 commercial license.    Which was $20K first
CPU, $5K second or more, unless you had a binary redistribution license
which was $150K for the >>rights<<, and then there was a sliding scale for
the binaries that started at $1.5K.  There were a bunch of other terms in
that license that were problematic (which I've forgotten and no longer have
a draft), but as I said, almost the moment Al Arms and the team announced
the V7 commercial redistribution license - numerous firms were unhappy.

An important thing occurred ( check out
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/1658611 ), which is the IEEE 1978
Asilomar Workshop on Microprocessors - Stanford Professor Dennis Allison
was the key organizer.  I remember lots of the commercial folks at what we
now call AMW, both thrilled and complaining about the fact that AT&T was
working on a redistribution license.  By the 1979 version of the AMW, the
hue, and cry were getting loud.  Remember that Prof. Allison was consulting
for most of us in those days, and by December, he organized a meeting of
about ten firms at Ricki's Hyatt and got Al Arms to come.

I don't remember the Wollongong folks being there [but they were likely
invited], but I do remember Peter Weiner was there (as was Bill Gates and
Bob Greenberg from Microsoft as well as Bob Metcalfe from his new
start-up 3Com). But there were folks from HP, Tektronix, DEC, IBM, and
smaller firms like ISC and SCO. Two things came out of that meeting -- one
was we started to negotiate what would become the System III license and
this also set the seeds for the creation of */usr/group* (later called
UNICOM) as USENIX/IEEE/ACM were not in a position (nor did any of them want
to be) to try to be a commercial UNIX trade group.

So ... AT&T (via Al Arms) *wanted one place to negotiate and in the open* -
so they could show the justice department that they were neither trying to
be in the business (i.e., we were all coming to them) and were always
treating everyone in the "market" the same -* i.e.* common license terms
(post-Judge the later did not work out too well and we ended up with OSF /
UI and the rest of the war).



ᐧ
ᐧ

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[TUHS] Re: PWB 1.0 Distro and Licensing Timeframe

[Jon Forrest]

One minor data point - Ford Aerospace was using PWB (v?) in
1977 when I started working there. It was unusual for such a
large company to be running Unix at that time, which was one of the
reasons I decided to work there.

I don't know if the fact that Ford had the contract to produce
KSOS, the "secure" version of Unix, had anything to do with
the licenses they had.

Jon Forrest

[TUHS] Re: PWB 1.0 Distro and Licensing Timeframe

[Rich Salz]

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I remember reading one of the glossy unix trade magazines (probably *Unix
Review*) had an interview with one of the first commercial licensees (can't
think who but they were a Bell Labs alum IIRC), and he gave the anecdote
that they were trying to figure out a price and said "a penny a line of
code."

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[TUHS] Re: PWB 1.0 Distro and Licensing Timeframe

[Warner Losh]

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On Sat, Mar 11, 2023 at 9:41 AM Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com> wrote:
I have never figured out who was first (Peter Weiner at ISC or the folks at
Wollongong) or the amount of the fees involved, but at some point, both
managed to negotiate a special license to redistribute UNIX in some manner.
My memory is that the commercial target had to get some sort of license
from AT&T first. My memory of the ISC product was it was the source for
your 11/70 [factiod - the Motorola guys were using it for what would
eventually become the 68000 - Les Crudele told me they had source].  I also
remember that when later Wollongong Vax products appeared, sources were
available, but I've forgotten the details - I was never a customer --
Warner might know more here.

Here's what I know about TWG's products. It's tangentially related to unix,
and a bit rambly...

After the original Unix port from Wollongong, they branched out. They knew
they couldn't compete with Berkeley sending out tapes from the early 1980s,
so they pursued two niche markets. They got into two niche markets. They
used their Unix license to sell Eunice, which had been developed at
Stanford by David Kashtan. He took BSD Unix and managed to get enough of
the kernel to run as a process (and some device drivers?) under VMS. I
don't know if he started with 4.2 or redid the work later with 4.2, but
that added networking to the VAX, which DEC didn't have at the time. TWG
marketed Eunice for a pretty penny. The emulation wasn't very complete
(though many things just worked) owing mostly to the mismatch between the
VMS process model being super heavyweight and Unix's fork/exec being
lightweight. Plus, the pipe device driver never quite got to complete
compatibility (it lacked the ability to pass fd credentials from process to
process, for example). So it was kinda a mess. Source code was available,
but hella expensive and it was only available so that TWG could sell into
the government market that required it. TWG's

So, v7 was kinda dead, and Eunice was a super-niche thing from the get go,
what did TWG do? Networking. They separated (poorly, imho, but more ports
better than one good port) the networking part of enuice from the rest and
marketed that as a product. It was a total hack job, but for a product in
high demand. That experience, and their relationship with Bell Labs meant
they ported the networking code to System III and newer machines and
marketed it to all of those (so we had several 3Bx systems around running
System Vr2 and newer, though we had some machine that was system III
nominally, though i don't recall those details, but Sony NEWS, SunOS, Sun
road runner, HP running unix and non-unix, IBM maybe and a lot of others
were in the QA lab). My rather simple .cshrc and similar files date from
this time period since we had NFS running on all (many) of them. They also
purchased IP/TCP or hired someone whose name I should remember but don't to
make it good. He optimized the heck out of it to turn it into their
software to compete with FTP Software's offering. Source wasn't available
for any of this. They were going for quantity of ports, not quality of any
individual one. They also had an ISO stack that they sunk a bunch of money
into (port of BSD's to System V), but that didn't go anywhere...

The quality issues is why TGV got started. I have a vague memory that David
Kashtan went to SRI and redid networking for VMS right and spun out  TGV so
there was a lot of bad blood between TWG and TGV. Multinet was cool because
it could plug in ISO protocols too, and was a native VMS thing with only
the TCP stack itself being BSD code. It's integration into VMS was quite
good, and they did better at benchmarks than TWG. I have friends still that
used to work there if people are interested in fact checking my maybe not
so great memory here...

I only ever logged into Eunice once or twice. I did a lot of work with
TWG's VMS TCP/IP product in college and went to work for them afterwards
back when I thought VMS would win over Unix (silly me).

Warner

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[TUHS] Re: PWB 1.0 Distro and Licensing Timeframe

[segaloco via TUHS]

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Edition VII Workbench....the text in the document implies research V7 with SCCS from PWB, there's no chance this was a rare public offering of PWB 2.0 is there?

- Matt G.
------- Original Message -------
On Saturday, March 11th, 2023 at 10:39 AM, Warner Losh <imp@bsdimp.com> wrote:

> On Sat, Mar 11, 2023 at 9:41 AM Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com> wrote:
>
> I have never figured out who was first (Peter Weiner at ISC or the folks at Wollongong) or the amount of the fees involved, but at some point, both managed to negotiate a special license to redistribute UNIX in some manner. My memory is that the commercial target had to get some sort of license from AT&T first. My memory of the ISC product was it was the source for your 11/70 [factiod - the Motorola guys were using it for what would eventually become the 68000 - Les Crudele told me they had source]. I also remember that when later Wollongong Vax products appeared, sources were available, but I've forgotten the details - I was never a customer -- Warner might know more here.
>
> Here's what I know about TWG's products. It's tangentially related to unix, and a bit rambly...
>
> After the original Unix port from Wollongong, they branched out. They knew they couldn't compete with Berkeley sending out tapes from the early 1980s, so they pursued two niche markets. They got into two niche markets. They used their Unix license to sell Eunice, which had been developed at Stanford by David Kashtan. He took BSD Unix and managed to get enough of the kernel to run as a process (and some device drivers?) under VMS. I don't know if he started with 4.2 or redid the work later with 4.2, but that added networking to the VAX, which DEC didn't have at the time. TWG marketed Eunice for a pretty penny. The emulation wasn't very complete (though many things just worked) owing mostly to the mismatch between the VMS process model being super heavyweight and Unix's fork/exec being lightweight. Plus, the pipe device driver never quite got to complete compatibility (it lacked the ability to pass fd credentials from process to process, for example). So it was kinda a mess. Source code was available, but hella expensive and it was only available so that TWG could sell into the government market that required it. TWG's
>
> So, v7 was kinda dead, and Eunice was a super-niche thing from the get go, what did TWG do? Networking. They separated (poorly, imho, but more ports better than one good port) the networking part of enuice from the rest and marketed that as a product. It was a total hack job, but for a product in high demand. That experience, and their relationship with Bell Labs meant they ported the networking code to System III and newer machines and marketed it to all of those (so we had several 3Bx systems around running System Vr2 and newer, though we had some machine that was system III nominally, though i don't recall those details, but Sony NEWS, SunOS, Sun road runner, HP running unix and non-unix, IBM maybe and a lot of others were in the QA lab). My rather simple .cshrc and similar files date from this time period since we had NFS running on all (many) of them. They also purchased IP/TCP or hired someone whose name I should remember but don't to make it good. He optimized the heck out of it to turn it into their software to compete with FTP Software's offering. Source wasn't available for any of this. They were going for quantity of ports, not quality of any individual one. They also had an ISO stack that they sunk a bunch of money into (port of BSD's to System V), but that didn't go anywhere...
>
> The quality issues is why TGV got started. I have a vague memory that David Kashtan went to SRI and redid networking for VMS right and spun out TGV so there was a lot of bad blood between TWG and TGV. Multinet was cool because it could plug in ISO protocols too, and was a native VMS thing with only the TCP stack itself being BSD code. It's integration into VMS was quite good, and they did better at benchmarks than TWG. I have friends still that used to work there if people are interested in fact checking my maybe not so great memory here...
>
> I only ever logged into Eunice once or twice. I did a lot of work with TWG's VMS TCP/IP product in college and went to work for them afterwards back when I thought VMS would win over Unix (silly me).
>
> Warner

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[TUHS] Re: PWB 1.0 Distro and Licensing Timeframe

[Heinz Lycklama]

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Peter Weiner and 3 others founded ISC in the summer of 1977.
At that time I believe he had already negotiated a UNIX license
from Western Electric for Rand Corporation in Santa Monica, CA.
     1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interactive_Systems_Corporation
When I joined ISC in May 1978 my first project was the porting
of the UNIX environment to new VAX/VMS system from DEC. We
installed the first version of that product in Germany in the Fall
of 1979, and rit emained one of the major ISC products for a long time.

Heinz

On 3/11/2023 10:39 AM, Warner Losh wrote:
>
>
> On Sat, Mar 11, 2023 at 9:41 AM Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com> wrote:
> I have never figured out who was first (Peter Weiner at ISC or the 
> folks at Wollongong) or the amount of the fees involved, but at some 
> point, both managed to negotiate a special license to redistribute 
> UNIX in some manner. My memory is that the commercial target had 
> to get some sort of license from AT&T first. My memory of the ISC 
> product was it was the source for your 11/70 [factiod- the Motorola 
> guys were using it for what would eventually become the 68000 - Les 
> Crudele told me they had source].  I also remember that when later 
> Wollongong Vax products appeared, sources were available, but I've 
> forgotten the details - I was never a customer -- Warner might know 
> more here.
>
> Here's what I know about TWG's products. It's tangentially related to 
> unix, and a bit rambly...
>
> After the original Unix port from Wollongong, they branched out. They 
> knew they couldn't compete with Berkeley sending out tapes from the 
> early 1980s, so they pursued two niche markets. They got into two 
> niche markets. They used their Unix license to sell Eunice, which had 
> been developed at Stanford by David Kashtan. He took BSD Unix and 
> managed to get enough of the kernel to run as a process (and some 
> device drivers?) under VMS. I don't know if he started with 4.2 or 
> redid the work later with 4.2, but that added networking to the VAX, 
> which DEC didn't have at the time. TWG marketed Eunice for a pretty 
> penny. The emulation wasn't very complete (though many things just 
> worked) owing mostly to the mismatch between the VMS process model 
> being super heavyweight and Unix's fork/exec being lightweight. Plus, 
> the pipe device driver never quite got to complete compatibility (it 
> lacked the ability to pass fd credentials from process to process, for 
> example). So it was kinda a mess. Source code was available, but hella 
> expensive and it was only available so that TWG could sell into the 
> government market that required it. TWG's
>
> So, v7 was kinda dead, and Eunice was a super-niche thing from the get 
> go, what did TWG do? Networking. They separated (poorly, imho, but 
> more ports better than one good port) the networking part of enuice 
> from the rest and marketed that as a product. It was a total hack job, 
> but for a product in high demand. That experience, and their 
> relationship with Bell Labs meant they ported the networking code to 
> System III and newer machines and marketed it to all of those (so we 
> had several 3Bx systems around running System Vr2 and newer, though we 
> had some machine that was system III nominally, though i don't recall 
> those details, but Sony NEWS, SunOS, Sun road runner, HP running unix 
> and non-unix, IBM maybe and a lot of others were in the QA lab). My 
> rather simple .cshrc and similar files date from this time period 
> since we had NFS running on all (many) of them. They also purchased 
> IP/TCP or hired someone whose name I should remember but don't to make 
> it good. He optimized the heck out of it to turn it into their 
> software to compete with FTP Software's offering. Source wasn't 
> available for any of this. They were going for quantity of ports, not 
> quality of any individual one. They also had an ISO stack that they 
> sunk a bunch of money into (port of BSD's to System V), but that 
> didn't go anywhere...
>
> The quality issues is why TGV got started. I have a vague memory that 
> David Kashtan went to SRI and redid networking for VMS right and spun 
> out  TGV so there was a lot of bad blood between TWG and TGV. Multinet 
> was cool because it could plug in ISO protocols too, and was a native 
> VMS thing with only the TCP stack itself being BSD code. It's 
> integration into VMS was quite good, and they did better at benchmarks 
> than TWG. I have friends still that used to work there if people are 
> interested in fact checking my maybe not so great memory here...
>
> I only ever logged into Eunice once or twice. I did a lot of work with 
> TWG's VMS TCP/IP product in college and went to work for them 
> afterwards back when I thought VMS would win over Unix (silly me).
>
> Warner

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[TUHS] Re: PWB 1.0 Distro and Licensing Timeframe

[Jonathan Gray]

On Sat, Mar 11, 2023 at 11:40:54AM -0500, Clem Cole wrote:
> On Sat, Mar 11, 2023 at 6:12 AM Jonathan Gray <jsg@jsg.id.au> wrote:
> >
> > That was commercially sold as a v7 port (in 1980) according to
> >
> > That was the second license that I am aware Wollongong had. Remember
> that ISC and Wollongong received special V6 licenses (and maybe HCR - we'd
> have to check with Mike Tikson) - more in a minute.
> 
> >
> > ISC were selling products based on v6 and PWB in 1977:
> > "By June he had formed Interactive Systems Corp. in Santa Monica,
> > Calif., and had a license from Bell Labs to market Unix-based systems.
> >
> Yup, Peter got a special license shortly after Wollongong - Heinz as a
> founder/early person at ISC may know more of the details.

The Wollongong Group (TWG) were formed in 1980.  The special v6 license
you refer to was for the university?

The university got permission from Western Electric to send their v6
port to the University of Illinois (January 1978) and the University of
Melbourne (March 1978) according to the Juris Reinfelds paper.
"By 1980 we had shipped about thirty systems to all parts of the world."

"Professor J. Reinfelds of the University of Wollongong visited Professor
C. William Gear of the University of Illinois at Urbana and
Dr M. D. McIlroy of Bell Telephone Laboratories, Murray Hill,
New Jersey, from 27 January to 4 March 1979 to develop the portability
of the UNIX time-sharing operating system."
Australia. Department of Science and the Environment.
Annual report, no.349 of 1979, 1979-06-30, p.130
https://trove.nla.gov.au/work/239318564

> UNIX appeared in the late 1960s/1970s, and the team started to publish
> papers about it which got folks like me interested.  So ... the first UNIX
> licenses are for universities - (Lou Katz at Columbia is "user 0"). And Al
> starts to get "inundated with requests" for the research world.    The
> first licenses were one-offs, but by the time V6 - they had a university
> license template for use. But in either case, the license says - "sure, go
> ahead and play with it, but don't ask us for help"  (as we said at the time
> - AT&T/WE was "abandoned UNIX on your doorstep"). The UNIX IP ends up at
> Harvard and then some Harvard folks end up at Rand.       Rand  [a
> commercial entity] wants to use the IP - so the original license for
> researchers is insufficient.
> 
> The legal team AT&T in MH has a problem ... content decree says they can
> license it but can not "sell.".  They write a special license for Rand (for
> the Fifth Edition, I think - but it may have 6th by then, and I never asked
> any of the Rand folks how much $s was exchanged).    Shortly after that, a
> few other commercial folks appear (ISC, Wollogone being two), and the
> original Rand commercial license is more formalized for the 6th edition
> commercial license (*a.k.a.* in the order of $15K for the first CPU, 3K for
> the second/3rd, *etc*. IIRC - but that might be wrong).    Remember, a
> PDP-11 large enough to run UNIX costs about $150-200K so 10% was considered
> "fair and reasonable").

A $20k price for commercial use is mentioned by Bill Mayhew then of
the Boston Children's Museum in
https://archive.org/details/1975-03-peoples-computer-company/page/10/mode/2up

"There are now more than 70 UNIX installations within and outside the
Bell System. Some representative non-Bell users include Columbia
University; the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry; Harvard
University; and the Boston Children’s Museum, the first licensed
non-Bell users."

https://www.usenix.org/system/files/login/articles/login_apr15_16_unix_news.pdf
"UNIX at the Children’s Museum has been fully operational since
August, 1974. Development work jointly with Harvard University began the
previous winter, making us one of the first non-Bell users"

Bill Mayhew recounted this in
https://www.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/2002-November/002217.html

Thanks for describing the meeting with Al Arms and related background.

[TUHS] Re: PWB 1.0 Distro and Licensing Timeframe

[Jonathan Gray]

On Sun, Mar 12, 2023 at 12:44:14PM +1100, Jonathan Gray wrote:
> 
> A $20k price for commercial use is mentioned by Bill Mayhew then of
> the Boston Children's Museum in
> https://archive.org/details/1975-03-peoples-computer-company/page/10/mode/2up
> 
> "There are now more than 70 UNIX installations within and outside the
> Bell System. Some representative non-Bell users include Columbia
> University; the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry; Harvard
> University; and the Boston Children’s Museum, the first licensed
> non-Bell users."
> 
> https://www.usenix.org/system/files/login/articles/login_apr15_16_unix_news.pdf
> "UNIX at the Children’s Museum has been fully operational since
> August, 1974. Development work jointly with Harvard University began the
> previous winter, making us one of the first non-Bell users"
> 
> Bill Mayhew recounted this in
> https://www.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/2002-November/002217.html

"The first educational licence was granted, in October 1973, to
Columbia University
...
The Children's Museum in Boston was the first non educational recipient
of UNIX in October 1973 and The Hebrew University of Jerusalem was the
first organization outside the US to obtain a licence, in February 1974.
Queen Mary College in London was granted a licence in May 1974 and the
Rand Corporation became the first commercial licensee, in July 1974."
from Pirzada's thesis

"the University of New South Wales negotiated a license for software
from the Western Electric Company of New York at the end of 1974"
John Lions - Experiences with the UNIX Time-sharing System
Software Practice and Experience, vol. 9, no. 9, pp. 701–709, Sept. 1979

[TUHS] Boston Children's Museum (was: PWB 1.0 Distro and Licensing Timeframe)

[Jonathan Gray]

On Sun, Mar 12, 2023 at 12:44:14PM +1100, Jonathan Gray wrote:
> 
> A $20k price for commercial use is mentioned by Bill Mayhew then of
> the Boston Children's Museum in
> https://archive.org/details/1975-03-peoples-computer-company/page/10/mode/2up

Distributions/Research/Dennis_v6/v6doc.gz has material from
the museum.

The article mentions "Federal Screw Works VOTRAX voice synthesizer"
And v6doc.gz is what speak was partly reconstructed from.

article mentions:
"UGUESS (1 to 100 number-guessing), 10GUESS (1 to 10 number-guessing),
a modified WUMPUS, HANGMAN, TICTACTOE, MATHDICE (an adding game for
itty-bittys), and 31 (the game of thirty-one)."

v6doc.gz includes:

char *descrp[]{
        "a game of tic-tac-toe",
        "an adding game for younger children",
        "a number guessing game",
        "an easier number guessing game",
        "the game of hangman",
        "find the wumpus hiding in a series of caves",
        "try to make a pile of 31 objects before the computer does",
        0
};
char *games[]{
        "tictactoe",
        "mathdice",
        "uguess",
        "10guess",
        "hangman",
        "wumpus",
        "31",
        0
};

 *      SHELL
 *      Copyright 1975, The Children's Museum, Boston
 *      Author: Bill Mayhew

https://archive.org/details/1974-09-peoples-computer-company/page/22/mode/2up

"UNIX has a version of your Wumpus game, written in C, that has become
a big hit at Harvard on their system and has been rewritten in other
languages there, too.
...
Can you send us ASAP hardcopy listings of your games so that we can
translate them to C"

https://archive.org/details/digital_edu_number_10/page/24/mode/2up
from 1973, mentions a pdp-8 with logo and raising funds for a pdp-11

> 
> "There are now more than 70 UNIX installations within and outside the
> Bell System. Some representative non-Bell users include Columbia
> University; the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry; Harvard
> University; and the Boston Children’s Museum, the first licensed
> non-Bell users."
> 
> https://www.usenix.org/system/files/login/articles/login_apr15_16_unix_news.pdf
> "UNIX at the Children’s Museum has been fully operational since
> August, 1974. Development work jointly with Harvard University began the
> previous winter, making us one of the first non-Bell users"
> 
> Bill Mayhew recounted this in
> https://www.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/2002-November/002217.html

[TUHS] Re: PWB 1.0 Distro and Licensing Timeframe

[Warner Losh]

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On Sat, Mar 11, 2023, 4:12 AM Jonathan Gray <jsg@jsg.id.au> wrote:

> On Fri, Mar 10, 2023 at 01:24:26PM -0800, Warner Losh wrote:
> > On Fri, Mar 10, 2023, 2:07 PM Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com> wrote:
> >
> > > 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].
> > >
> >
> > How did The Wollongong Group sell/send out the Interdata/Harris Unix
> Level
> > 6 binaries then? Or did they get some kind of special since they bought
> the
> > rights from Wollongong University?
>
> That was commercially sold as a v7 port (in 1980) according to
> Juris Reinfelds in
> tuhs/Distributions/Other/Interdata/uow103747.pdf
> "Price includes a binary license"
> https://archive.org/details/login_october-1980/page/11/mode/2up


They also sold the v6 port. They were quite proud of that legacy when I
worked
there in 1989. Of course, this was the marketing department, and they never
lie or exaggerate, right? I'm guessing now they were counting the original
tapes
that the University had sent out... I'm suddenly doubting the lore that I've
known as a fact for a long time... I have references to Wollongong Unix,
Level 6
in my Lillihammer talk, which I had seen when I worked there, but the only
references I can find to that are about the University version, not the TWG
version now that I'm looking again for it.

However, the earliest documentation that I could find is for the 7th
edition, though.
https://kyber.io/rawvids/uow103747_uow103747.pdf in the frustrations
section on
the 4th page (which looks to be the same thing that is in TUHS).

Another location is page 37 of
https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Documentation/AUUGN/AUUGN-V03.2.pdf
which talks about EDITION VII and EDITION VII WORKBENCH on WOLLONGONG
GROUP letterhead (the same letterhead I got my TWG job offer on,
interestingly
enough). This is the first mention of TWG in the AUUGN. Interesting too was
that TWG claimed 'EDITION VII' as a trademark...

Human Computing Resources (HCR), were somewhat related to the University
> of Toronto's Dynamic Graphics Project.  HCR first sold Xenix and later
> UNITY?  Richard Miller worked at HCR and was involved with their port to
> the NS16032 after the Interdata port
>
> https://archive.org/details/1983-proceedings-unicom-san-diego/page/269/mode/2up
>

Yes. He was quite the prolific porter...


> ISC were selling products based on v6 and PWB in 1977:
> "By June he had formed Interactive Systems Corp. in Santa Monica,
> Calif., and had a license from Bell Labs to market Unix-based systems.
> ...
> The company calls its enhanced Unix systems Interactive System/One.
> Interactive System/Two is coming along. It too is based on a Bell Labs
> development.  This one, called Programmers Workbench (PWB), uses Unix
> and makes it possible to develop software for large scale computers
> using minis. Interactive has a license from Bell for PWB, similar to
> the one it holds for Unix."
> Datamation, November 1977, pg 189
>
> https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_datamation_42830601/page/n179/mode/2up


That's a nice find... It doesn't say v6 or 6th Edition, nor which version
of pwb,
but in 1977 it must be V6 or earlier.

Warner

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