[TUHS] Re: UNIX on (not quite bare) System/370

[George Michaelson <ggm@algebras.org>]

Any comment now about taking ideas from Berkeley is informed by the
twisted history which followed. At the time I can totally understand a
preference for code from the tertiary education sector over IBM absent
some explicit decision higher up about IPR: dealing with IBM must have
been a very complicated story for Bell over time, and it wasn't that
long since the whole CP/M MS-DOS thing had blown up with sillyness on
both sides. It is entirely possible a decision with this much weight
was made on a hunch/feel at some desk who had suffered at the hands of
big blue lawyers at the time. Just because at a transatlantic distance
I found the regents a nightmare to deal with (4.1 to 4.2 upgrade,
re-licencing with bodies moving so signatures differing, then much
later the same dance over some VLSI design s/w at UQ in Australia)
doesn't mean Bell would have. To the contrary, they might have had the
lowest bar legal and contractual barriers to work with.

There was also the whole thing about DoD funding. Sockets are crap. I
think they only became a de-facto standard because of familiarity. But
again, put that back into historical context and have a platform
coming out of the Californian state education system funded by the DoD
with a network interface. DoD funding..yea lets hitch on that: maybe
there will be some more of that sweet DARPA money flowing and if we're
familiar with it, then we can get into the future contracts: Not that
anyone cutting code thinks that way but desk jockeys would maybe?

York Unix was how I met things on a Vax with VM. I remain a fan of how
Charles Forsyth codes things. Small and elegant. I don't know that it
fed back into anything.