[COFF] Standing on the shoulders of giants, free or not

Warren Toomey wkt at tuhs.org
Wed Feb 19 17:56:09 AEST 2020


I'll put in my own $0.05 with my story about why TUHS was created. I fell
in love with Unix in the late 80s, first on a Pyramid 90x running OSx (dual
AT&T/BSD userland), followed by a sysadmin stint on the Pyramid and a Sun 2
box running SunOS. No access to source code, except for what I could download
from the Usenet comp.sources.* newsgroups.

Then the university I worked for purchased Minix 1.1 and I was a pig in mud:
I could look at the source, apply the patches from the Minix newsgroup and
rebuild the entire system. Still no access to Unix source code.

I took a new job (early 90s on Sun 3s) and started to pester people to try and
get a copy of V7 Unix, as I knew I wouldn't be able to get the SunOS source.
Luckily, someone sent me an RL02 disk image with (modified) V7 on it. Then I
found out that my new employer (UNSW) actually had a Unix source license.

It was at that point that I began the quest to get the "ancient" Unix sources
put under a free/cheap licence.

Cheers, Warren


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