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

[ron minnich via TUHS]

I am intrigued by the meaning of the name Resistors …

On Sun, Sep 21, 2025 at 14:24 John Levine via TUHS <tuhs at tuhs.org> wrote:

> 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
>