[TUHS] PWB 1.0 Distro and Licensing Timeframe

[Heinz Lycklama]

Peter Weiner and 3 others founded ISC in the summer of 1977.
At that time I believe he had already negotiated a UNIX license
from Western Electric for Rand Corporation in Santa Monica, CA.
     1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interactive_Systems_Corporation
When I joined ISC in May 1978 my first project was the porting
of the UNIX environment to new VAX/VMS system from DEC. We
installed the first version of that product in Germany in the Fall
of 1979, and rit emained one of the major ISC products for a long time.

Heinz

On 3/11/2023 10:39 AM, Warner Losh wrote:
>
>
> On Sat, Mar 11, 2023 at 9:41 AM Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com> wrote:
> I have never figured out who was first (Peter Weiner at ISC or the 
> folks at Wollongong) or the amount of the fees involved, but at some 
> point, both managed to negotiate a special license to redistribute 
> UNIX in some manner. My memory is that the commercial target had 
> to get some sort of license from AT&T first. My memory of the ISC 
> product was it was the source for your 11/70 [factiod- the Motorola 
> guys were using it for what would eventually become the 68000 - Les 
> Crudele told me they had source].  I also remember that when later 
> Wollongong Vax products appeared, sources were available, but I've 
> forgotten the details - I was never a customer -- Warner might know 
> more here.
>
> Here's what I know about TWG's products. It's tangentially related to 
> unix, and a bit rambly...
>
> After the original Unix port from Wollongong, they branched out. They 
> knew they couldn't compete with Berkeley sending out tapes from the 
> early 1980s, so they pursued two niche markets. They got into two 
> niche markets. They used their Unix license to sell Eunice, which had 
> been developed at Stanford by David Kashtan. He took BSD Unix and 
> managed to get enough of the kernel to run as a process (and some 
> device drivers?) under VMS. I don't know if he started with 4.2 or 
> redid the work later with 4.2, but that added networking to the VAX, 
> which DEC didn't have at the time. TWG marketed Eunice for a pretty 
> penny. The emulation wasn't very complete (though many things just 
> worked) owing mostly to the mismatch between the VMS process model 
> being super heavyweight and Unix's fork/exec being lightweight. Plus, 
> the pipe device driver never quite got to complete compatibility (it 
> lacked the ability to pass fd credentials from process to process, for 
> example). So it was kinda a mess. Source code was available, but hella 
> expensive and it was only available so that TWG could sell into the 
> government market that required it. TWG's
>
> So, v7 was kinda dead, and Eunice was a super-niche thing from the get 
> go, what did TWG do? Networking. They separated (poorly, imho, but 
> more ports better than one good port) the networking part of enuice 
> from the rest and marketed that as a product. It was a total hack job, 
> but for a product in high demand. That experience, and their 
> relationship with Bell Labs meant they ported the networking code to 
> System III and newer machines and marketed it to all of those (so we 
> had several 3Bx systems around running System Vr2 and newer, though we 
> had some machine that was system III nominally, though i don't recall 
> those details, but Sony NEWS, SunOS, Sun road runner, HP running unix 
> and non-unix, IBM maybe and a lot of others were in the QA lab). My 
> rather simple .cshrc and similar files date from this time period 
> since we had NFS running on all (many) of them. They also purchased 
> IP/TCP or hired someone whose name I should remember but don't to make 
> it good. He optimized the heck out of it to turn it into their 
> software to compete with FTP Software's offering. Source wasn't 
> available for any of this. They were going for quantity of ports, not 
> quality of any individual one. They also had an ISO stack that they 
> sunk a bunch of money into (port of BSD's to System V), but that 
> didn't go anywhere...
>
> The quality issues is why TGV got started. I have a vague memory that 
> David Kashtan went to SRI and redid networking for VMS right and spun 
> out  TGV so there was a lot of bad blood between TWG and TGV. Multinet 
> was cool because it could plug in ISO protocols too, and was a native 
> VMS thing with only the TCP stack itself being BSD code. It's 
> integration into VMS was quite good, and they did better at benchmarks 
> than TWG. I have friends still that used to work there if people are 
> interested in fact checking my maybe not so great memory here...
>
> I only ever logged into Eunice once or twice. I did a lot of work with 
> TWG's VMS TCP/IP product in college and went to work for them 
> afterwards back when I thought VMS would win over Unix (silly me).
>
> Warner
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