[TUHS] PWB 1.0 Distro and Licensing Timeframe
Heinz Lycklama
heinz at osta.com
Sun Mar 12 12:02:14 AEST 2023
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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