[TUHS] Did System V Really Prevent 5BSD?

[Wesley Parish via TUHS]

Regarding Eunice, was the source actually distributed in any way? And 
even if not, are there any source tapes still surviving?

Wesley Parish

On 29/12/2025 16:55, Heinz Lycklama via TUHS wrote:
> Regarding the reference to "Eunics" below - it was actually
> called "Eunice" - a product introduced by the Wollongong Group
> In 1981. We (ISC) also introduced a product that provided the UNIX
> environment running on top of the DEC VMS system in 1979.
> I took the lead on that project/product for ISC when I started with
> ISC in early 1978. It turned out to be a successful product by
> ISC for many years in the 1980's.
>
> Heinz
>
> On 12/28/2025 6:53 PM, Jon Forrest via TUHS wrote:
>> Some very minor notes:
>>
>> On 12/28/25 5:12 PM, Clem Cole via TUHS wrote:
>>
>>> And getting back to BSD the key differences between 4.0 and 4.1 are 
>>> pretty
>>> small and the time between them was short (Oct 1980 and June 1981).  
>>> The
>>> primary differences are the #ifdef FASTVAX stuff that Joy did over the
>>> winter after the dust up that the Stanford folks started  in the 
>>> fall 1980
>>
>> All the talk about Stanford should make it clear that it was actually
>> the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), not Stanford University.
>> SRI was also one of the first 4 nodes on the Arpanet.
>>
>>> - Joy had to demonstrate that Unix was just as fast as VMS (which 
>>> had been
>>> written in assembler). He instrumented a bunch of the kernel and if a
>>> couple places dropped into assembly and got Unix to perform within a 
>>> very
>>> small epsilon on everything that DARPA cared about.  So the issue 
>>> became
>>> that ATT nor DEC was supporting Unix. CSRG does not yet exist.
>>
>> In the early 1980s David Kashtan at SRI wrote Eunics, which was a way to
>> run Unix (I don't recall which version) on top of VMS. It was an
>> emulation layer, not a virtual machine. (I'm not aware of any VMs that
>> ran on top of VMS). I used an VMS executable version of 'vi' that worked
>> just fine for most of my VMS career.
>>
>> Kashtan and Joy went back and forth for a while. I think both
>> communities (VMS and Unix) benefited from their work.
>>
>>> [For a
>>> historical prospective, Stanford had counter proposed using DEC/VMS and
>>> Australian Wollongong’s Unix for VMS and the Tek/CMU IP/TCP stack 
>>> for VMS -
>>> two commercial products and the later FOSS. 
>>
>> I don't recall how Kashtan's Eunice, done at SRI, became part of the
>> Wollongong Group. I do know that Kashtan and Ken Adelman wrote a
>> IP/TCP for VMS called Multinet that was quite popular for a while.
>> I'm not aware of it ever becoming FOSS.
>>
>> (For a fascinating non-Unix anecdote, check out
>> https://www.californiacoastline.org/streisand/lawsuit.html about how
>> Adelman presumably used some of the money he made when he and Kashtan
>> sold Multinet to Cisco to fund his successful lawsuit defense against
>> Barbra Streisand.)
>>
>> Sorry to mention VMS so much. However, early Unix history was often
>> buffeted by what was happening in VMS and DEC.
>>
>> Jon
>>
>