[TUHS] Questions regarding early Unix contributors

Mary Ann Horton mah at mhorton.net
Fri Sep 25 01:20:08 AEST 2015


I defer to Clem on these.

As I heard it, Lorinda wrote the Writers Workbench, a name pun on PWB, 
of which style and diction were the cornerstones.  I thought she was at 
Bell Labs at the time.  I recall a Bell Labs written summary booklet of 
DWB, although I can't find it in my museum.

I also heard that Ted K (aka "frodo") got fsck released to Berkeley by 
swearing (somehow with a straight face) to the Bell Labs lawyers that it 
had no commercial value.

     Mary Ann

On 09/24/2015 07:08 AM, Clem Cole wrote:
>
> On Thu, Sep 24, 2015 at 9:27 AM, <arnold at skeeve.com 
> <mailto:arnold at skeeve.com>> wrote:
>
>     I think the Berkeley guys had an underground
>     pipeline to Bell labs and some stuff got out that way. :-)
>
>
> ​It was not underground at all.    Tools packaged in BSD came from all 
> over the community.   style and diction were released into the wild by 
> themselves before the were packaged into an AT&T USG UNIX or Research 
> UNIX release.  It got them personally directly and had them installed 
> at Tektronix soon after first publishing and a talk about them at 
> USENIX (IIRC that was the Boulder conference in the "Black Hole" movie 
> theatre.
>
> Since I had a minor stake in it (as my first C program) fsck is 
> another good example of the path to UCB .  Ted started the predecessor 
> program ​when he was at UMich (with Bill Joy). He did his OYOC year 
> and later a full PhD at CMU.   He was one of my lab partners in his 
> OYOC year.   fsck was a we know it now was done during that time ( and 
> I helped him a bit).   He was bring the sources back and forth from 
> Summit to CMU (at the time in an RK05 or sometimes a bootable DOS tape 
> image of one - I may still have one of these).    I believe he gave a 
> copy of the sources very early to wnj -- which is how it ended up in 
> 4.1BSD.  I don't think it was in the original 3.0 or 4.0 packages as 
> it was not in V5, V6 or V7 either.  I believe it was released in PWB 
> 2.0 - not sure and Minnie does not seem to have them.
>
> I'm pretty the SCCS and cpio sources came through one of the PWB 
> releases (1 or 2)  that UCB got from AT&T.
>
> ​Clem​
>
>
>
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