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Peter Weiner and 3 others founded ISC in the summer of 1977.<br>
At that time I believe he had already negotiated a UNIX license<br>
from Western Electric for Rand Corporation in Santa Monica, CA.<br>
1. <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interactive_Systems_Corporation">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interactive_Systems_Corporation</a><br>
When I joined ISC in May 1978 my first project was the porting<br>
of the UNIX environment to new VAX/VMS system from DEC. We<br>
installed the first version of that product in Germany in the Fall<br>
of 1979, and rit emained one of the major ISC products for a long
time.<br>
<br>
Heinz <br>
<br>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 3/11/2023 10:39 AM, Warner Losh
wrote:<br>
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<div dir="ltr">On Sat, Mar 11, 2023 at 9:41 AM Clem Cole <<a
href="mailto:clemc@ccc.com" moz-do-not-send="true"
class="moz-txt-link-freetext">clemc@ccc.com</a>> wrote:<br>
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<div style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><font
color="#0000ff">I have never figured out who was
first (Peter Weiner at ISC or the folks at
Wollongong) </font><span style="color:rgb(0,0,255)">or
the amount of the fees involved</span><span
style="color:rgb(0,0,255)">, 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 </span>was it was<span
style="color:rgb(0,0,255)"> the source for your
11/70 [</span>factiod<span
style="color:rgb(0,0,255)"> - the Motorola guys were
using it for what would eventually become the 68000
- Les Crudele told me they </span>had source<span
style="color:rgb(0,0,255)">]. I also remember that
wh</span><font color="#0000ff">en later
Wollongong Vax products app</font><span
style="color:rgb(0,0,255)">eared, sources were
available, but I've forgotten the details - I was
never a customer -- Warner might know more here.</span></div>
<div style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><span
style="color:rgb(0,0,255)"><br>
</span></div>
<div style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><span
style="color:rgb(0,0,255)"><font color="#000000">Here's
what I know about TWG's products. It's
tangentially related to unix, and a bit rambly...<br>
</font></span></div>
<div style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><span
style="color:rgb(0,0,255)"><br>
</span></div>
<div style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><span
style="color:rgb(0,0,255)"><font color="#000000">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</font>. <font color="#000000">He
took BSD Unix and managed to get enough of the
kernel to run as a process (and some device
drivers?) under VMS.</font> <font color="#000000">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 <br>
</font></span></div>
<div style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><span
style="color:rgb(0,0,255)"><br>
</span></div>
<div style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><span
style="color:rgb(0,0,255)"><font color="#000000">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...</font> <br>
</span></div>
<div style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><span
style="color:rgb(0,0,255)"><br>
</span></div>
<div style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><span
style="color:rgb(0,0,255)"><font color="#000000">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... <br>
</font></span></div>
<div style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><span
style="color:rgb(0,0,255)"><br>
</span></div>
<div style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><span
style="color:rgb(0,0,0)">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).<br>
</span></div>
<div style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><span
style="color:rgb(0,0,0)"><br>
</span></div>
<div style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><span
style="color:rgb(0,0,255)"><span
style="color:rgb(0,0,0)">Warner</span><br>
</span></div>
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style="color:rgb(0,0,255)"></span></div>
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