[TUHS] PWB 1.0 Distro and Licensing Timeframe

[segaloco via TUHS]

Hello folks, posing a question here that will help with some timelining.

So System III, according to everything I've read, was commercially issued in 1982.  However, PWB 3.0 was issued internally in 1980, two years prior.  This isn't that surprising, give USL some time to work it up for commercial-readiness.

Where I'm curious is if there was a similar gap for the public release of PWB, given that was earlier on and pre-support and such.  Was there a particular "public release" date for PWB 1.0 or would it have just been whenever folks started getting tapes out of Bell?  I know it shows up in a price sheet floating around from say 1983 or 1984 among the likes of V7, 32V, System III, and System V also for sale, but would anything that early have had a formal "ship date" indicating a day they cut the master to copy tapes from or was it more of a contact Bell, someone will cut you a tape of whatever we've got right now?

Also, was PWB held as something that would be "marketable" from the get-go, or was it more of a happy accident that it wound up in the right place in the right time to become the commercial line?  One would think USG Generic would be the one they'd shoot for being the "base" to build on, but everything I'm finding in my study of System III lately is pointing to a much more PWB-ish lineage with random borrowings from CB, PY, HO, IH, among others.

- Matt G.