[TUHS] copyright, was History of cal(1) ?

[John Levine via TUHS]

Hi, old R.E.S.I.S.T.O.R.S. member here.

It appears that Douglas McIlroy via TUHS <douglas.mcilroy at dartmouth.edu> said:
>Prior to Unix, Calvin Mooers had spooked AT&T about software
>copyrights. Mooers obtained the copyright for a 1966 CACM article
>about his TRAC language and sued Western Electric, claiming that
>Claude Kagan's implementation of TRAC based on the article infringed
>the copyright.  ...

>so appalling that they settled. The only publicly visible outcome was
>that Kagan changed the name of his implementation to Sam67.

No surprise about the name change since Cal had a trademark on the name TRAC.
Beyond that, Claude also changed the syntax a little so it looked more like
Strachey's GPM and less like Trac. Trac was unlike other macrogenerators in that
it cleanly separated I/O from macro expansion, and Sam76 still did it like Trac
did, but that would have been a patent issue and this was before software
patents.

The whole episode was extremely strange. Cal had known Claude and the RESISTORS
for years. Peter Eichenberger and I wrote our own Trac processors for the PDP-10
and PDP-11, independent of Claude's PDP-8 version. Cal had known about all of
this before he sued. I cannot tell whether he wanted money or credit or what,
but we had no hint that he was planning to sue or objected to anything we were
doing.  He never said anything to Peter or me.

Later in the 1980s I lived around the corner from Cal in Harvard Square
but unfortunately never got around to reintroducing myself.

R's,
John