On Fri, Mar 10, 2023 at 4:24 PM Warner Losh &lt;imp(a)bsdimp.com&gt; wrote: 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

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 &lt;jsg(a)jsg.id.au&gt; wrote: that ISC and Wollongong received special V6 licenses (and maybe HCR - we'd have to check with Mike Tikson) - more in a minute. Yup, Peter got a special license shortly after Wollongong - Heinz as a founder/early person at ISC may know more of the details. 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

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."

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 &lt;imp(a)bsdimp.com&gt; wrote:

On Sat, Mar 11, 2023 at 11:40:54AM -0500, Clem Cole wrote: 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 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/2… "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… "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.

On Sun, Mar 12, 2023 at 12:44:14PM +1100, Jonathan Gray wrote: 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/2… "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