[TUHS] PC Unix (had been How to Kill a Technical Conference

[Warner Losh]

On Tue, Apr 6, 2021 at 7:31 PM <heinz at osta.com> wrote:

> I developed LSX at Bell Labs in Murray Hill NJ in the 1974-1975
> timeframe.
> An existing C compiler made it possible without too much effort. The
> UNIX
> source was available to Universities by then. I also developed Mini-UNIX
> for the PDP11/10  (also no memory protection) in the 1976 timeframe.
> This source code was also made available to Universities, but the source
> code for LSX was not.
>
> Peter Weiner, the founder of INTERACTIVE Systems Corp.(ISC) in June
> 1977,
> the first commercial company to license UNIX source from Western
> Electric for $20,000. Binary licenses were available at the same time.
> I joined ISC in May of 1978 when ISC was the first company to offer
> UNIX support services to third parties. There was never any talk about
> licensing  UNIX source code from Western Electric (WE) from the founding
> of ISC to when the Intel 8086 micro became available in 1981.
> DEC never really targeted the PC market with the LSI-11 micro,
> and WE never made it easy to license binary copies of the UNIX
> source code, So LSX never really caught on in the commercial market.
> ISC was in the business of porting the UNIX source code to other
> computers, micro to mainframe, as new computer architectures
> were developed.
>

As the author of LSX and MiniUnix, are you aware of anybody porting
them to another non PDP-11 architecture? ISC didn't do that at all, but
maybe you heard of something through the years?

Warner
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