[TUHS] Univ. of Toronto tape distribution license circa 1977?

Jeremy C. Reed reed at reedmedia.net
Thu Oct 31 03:10:38 AEST 2013


(For reference ... I am writing a detailed history of Berkeley Unix ...)

Does anyone have a copy of and the story about the Univ. of Toronto 
license used for their tape distributions around 1977?

In an interview in Linux Magazine, Volume 1, Number 6, in November
1999, Joy said he just took a license from the University of Toronto
and modified it a little bit and started using that for his BSD.
It was a one-page license.

I have a copy of an early one page license (from AUUGN newsletter V01.3, 
Feb/Mar 1979) which was used for the Pascal and Ex release, but it says 
"(first) Berkeley Software Tape" on it which seems odd to number the 
real first distribution. Also the copy of the license I have is for $60, 
but the first distribution tapes were $50; these amounts are both 
documented in various places for 2BSD and 1BSD respectively. Since maybe 
the one page license says "(first)" and "$60", maybe there is a 
different earlier license?

I also tried Googling for some of the terminology but didn't find any 
hits.

So does anyone have a copy of the license for the Univ. of Toronto tape 
distribution from the mid 1970's?

On that note, can anyone tell me about the story of the Toronto Unix 
distributions? I understand in late 1978, the Univ. of Toronto Computing 
Services group and some other Toronto-area installations were providing 
their own Unix distributions for standardization of their commonly used 
commands and were forming the "Toronto Distribution Centre" (mentioned 
by Gregory Hill, see AUUGN V01.2, Dec-78 / Jan-79). But within a few 
years, the UTCS was using BSD.

  Jeremy C. Reed

echo 'EhZ[h ^jjf0%%h[[Zc[Z_W$d[j%Xeeai%ZW[ced#]dk#f[d]k_d%' | \
  tr            '#-~'            '\-.-{'





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