[TUHS] Any Interdata war stories?

[Warner Losh]

On Tue, Apr 29, 2025 at 12:55 AM <arnold at skeeve.com> wrote:
>
> > From: Tom Lyon <pugs78 at gmail.com>
> >
> > I was pleased to learn that the first port of S to UNIX was on the
> > Interdata 8/32, which I had my part in enabling.
>
> I would love to hear more about the Interdata port and what
> happened with it afterwards. Interdata seems to have disappeared
> into the dustbin of history.  And Unix on it apparently never
> got out of Bell Labs; I don't think the code for it is in the
> TUHS archives.
>
> Was the Interdata system in use at Bell Labs for actual work once
> the port was complete?
>
> ISTR there was a meeting with Interdata about changes in the architecture
> that Bell Labs wanted, that Interdata didn't want to make. What
> was the full story?
>
> Any other info would be welcome.

So on the marketing side, the Interdata port wound up being sold in the US
by The Wollogong Group (TWG). They marketed it to Harris computer users
more generally. Tom and Steve were frustrated that they couldn't market this
in .au so effectively sold their rights to TWG who did market it.

And then they branched out, using their V6 license to do a number of other
things:
* Eunice for VMS (4BSD environment for VMS)
* TCP/IP for VMS (the TCP. from 4.2BSD (and later 4.3BSD) ported to VMS,
as extracted from Eunice, not to be confused with TVG's Multinet).
* TCP/IP for a bunch of other System V systems (mostly 3B2*'s) as well as
HP (both HPUX and non unix systems) and a few other early odd-balls
that my memory isn't responding well to.
* Unix internals training with the Lions Book, including AT&T and Wollgong
intellectual property markings (I wish I'd tried hard to snag a copy when
I worked there: I had to settle for an Nth generation copy from a coworker).
* Some other early porting work that may have just been marketing material
to compete with Unisoft / raise funding. I just saw this stuff once at the TWG
offices and was given some hand-wavey explanation that amounted to
"don't worry about testing this"...
* IP/TCP for DOS (though this was an independent thing, done at MIT,
the licensing material for this product, IIRC, included some kind of
unix permission that confused me at the time, but it may have just
been lawyering to CYA rather than including anything).

Warner