[TUHS] The Mark Williams Company and Coherent

[Dan Cross]

On Fri, Mar 15, 2024 at 9:03 AM Dan Cross <crossd at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Fri, Mar 15, 2024 at 3:00 AM Rob Pike <robpike at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Another detail. There was lawyerly concern about the code being stolen, and we (127) were asked to find ways to test, absent their source, whether they had just stolen our source and built the binaries. It was soon concluded that there were enough details different to definitively say that at least most of the work was done in a clean room, as advertised, but the piece I liked best is that their PPT(1) program (ASCII art showing a paper tape rendering the argument text) did not include the original, and just discovered, bug that mispunched, if I remember right, the letter 'R'.
>
> Along those lines, Dennis Ritchie wrote up a summary of the event on
> USENET; apparently in 1998 (I had no idea it was this late):
> https://groups.google.com/g/alt.folklore.computers/c/_ZaYeY46eb4/m/5B41Uym6d4QJ

Sorry, just to clarify: I meant I had no idea Dennis's posting about
the event happened so late; by 1998 USENET was basically overrun by
spam. Obviously, the inspection trip had happened much earlier.

        - Dan C.