[TUHS] Did System V Really Prevent 5BSD?

[Warner Losh via TUHS]

9

On Sun, Dec 28, 2025, 9:11 PM Wesley Parish via TUHS <tuhs at tuhs.org> wrote:

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

Eunice was marketed by Wollongong, but it was Kashtan's work. It never had
a source distribution. Internally, source was tightly controlled. TWG's VMS
TCP/IP product had part of Eunice inside. Maybe some of the engineers from
the Falls Church office might have a copy, but I doubt it. TWG was sold to
attachmate, and the IP scattered I was told. Maybe Frank is around and can
say...

Warner


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
> >>
> >
>