Mental contamination (was t-shirts)

Warren Toomey wkt at henry.cs.adfa.oz.au
Wed Mar 18 14:07:23 AEST 1998


In article by Joerg Micheel:
> The /* You are not expected to understand this */ is also on the second
> page of Peter Salus' A Quater Century of UNIX, explaining a lot of folklore
> behind the UNIX history, including things like "a tape was found on the
> street to contain ...".

Yes, I'd love to lay my hands on the `50 bugs' tape. For those who don't
have Peter Salus' book (get out there & buy it!), this tape had fixes to
V6, but the lawyers prevented Bell Labs from distributing it. So, someone
`found' it lying in the street and that's how the patches found their way
out of the Labs.

>The "contamination" term is (as far as I can tell) originated at Berkeley.
>Kirk McKusick showed up with "Mentally contaminated" stickers for everyone
>attending the 4.4BSD Kernel Internals course at the Winter 1993 USENIX
>Conference, since he would present us - guess, what - source code! (of 4.4BSD)
> 
> I still have the sticker somewhere in my collection.

I got one of the `Free the Berkeley 4.4' t-shirts. Good stuff.

Kirk's the guy who is working on making the 4.xBSD releases available on CD.
Please don't hassle him about it; I'll do that 8-)

I've informed him that the SCO license covers 32V. Therefore, a lot of
people will soon become eligible to receive 4.xBSD.

	Warren

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