[TUHS] Did System V Really Prevent 5BSD?

[Heinz Lycklama via TUHS]

ISC also did not make the source for our UNIX on VMS
product available to customers. The possibility of finding
a copy of the ISC product is slim to none. Remember that the
ISC product part of the company was bought out by Sun
Microsystems  at the end of 1991. I left the company at the
same time  and went into full time consulting for the next
20 years. Sun was bought out by Oracle later on. So finding
a  copy of what we had in 1991 will be very hard to do now.

Heinz

On 12/28/2025 9:42 PM, Warner Losh via TUHS wrote:
> 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
>>>>