[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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