[TUHS] Release Dates, Systems History - (was Did System V Really Prevent 5BSD?)

[Warner Losh via TUHS]

On Mon, Dec 29, 2025 at 10:23 AM Clem Cole via TUHS <tuhs at tuhs.org> wrote:

> I never knew the story of how Kashtan's work ended up in Wollongong (others
> may know).


When I worked there it was complicated. Wollongong was marketing all the
things
related to Unix because it had a V6 license that it inherited from The
Wollongong
University when they licensed their V6 port to them for sale in the US.
Originally,
Eunice was 4BSD or 4.1BSD based (the differences being rather slight for
what
it did), but later 4.2BSD was ported and that was also marketed by TWG.
Afterwards,
TWG marketed a number of different Unix ports for obscure hardware related
to
P&E original. Then they branched out into network stacks (ports of 4.2BSD)
to
various System III and V related systems (boy there was a lot if 3B*
hardware
around the testing lab). They were one of the few places that could
effectively
market Eunice, I was told, due to their V6 license, so they got it
originally. The
business deal soon turned south when TWG marketed TCP/IP for VMS (which
is why it had Eunice inside). TWG was allowed to sell Eunice, but Kashtan
didn't
like that TWG had created a new product and shipped it under the old
agreement. I don't know if this was before or after he went off to found
TGV. There
was always a lot of tension at trade shows that we were at together. TGV was
a rewrite of the glue around the BSD networking stack, with many things
completely rewritten for VMS to give them a native VMS interface, rather
than
the clunky (to the VMS market) Unix interface. TGV also had better
performance much of the time, but TWG was first to market and had market
share when I was around. I know that TGV's Multinet also ported all the
BSD protocols, whereas Eunice just did TCP/IP, and though I never got a
look at the code, the people that did tell me that it was much cleaner than
the Eunice code (which was a hack that kinda worked: Clem posted an example
of why with the mailbox default settings changes... it only worked if you
upped a lot of SYSGEN limits).

I'm sure I have many of the details wrong, but the flavor is likely right.

I heard from an old friend at TWG who doesn't have a Eunice tape or anything
like that. But he told me the story of attachmate adding showers to the
offices and
their creation of a 'time capsule' behind one of the walls they put in for
the showers
an old Eunice tape (years after it was out of support). Google has the
buildings now,
and nobody knows what happened to it in the transition. There might be some
people
that have the source, but it's obscure enough that any of them are likely
to surface
and if they do, it's not clear if the tapes can be read.

I've also heard back from Kirk who confirmed my recollection of the story.
After BSD,
then 2BSD, then 3BSD, then 4BSD, 5BSD was the next logical release. AT&T had
already started to think ahead about marketing Unix as System V at the
time, so
they objected to the next BSD release being 5BSD, so 4.1BSD was born. The
listing that I saw was in between 4BSD and what is now known as 4.1BSD. It
was only after 4.2BSD that 2BSD became 2.8BSD and 2.9BSD as the 4.2BSD
networking
bits were back-ported to the pdp-11 Unix... 2.8BSD was because they'd
shipped about 80
tapes in a 'rolling release' sort of source code control.

Warner