[TUHS] List of earliest UNIX licensees?

[Thalia Archibald via TUHS]

On Feb 17, 2026, at 18:28, Tom Lyon wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 17, 2026 at 4:41 PM Jonathan Gray wrote:
>> On Tue, Feb 17, 2026 at 04:07:01PM -0800, Tom Lyon wrote:
>>> I seem to recall seeing somewhere a list of the earliest UNIX licensees -
>>> from one of Ken's notebooks, maybe?
>> 
>> https://github.com/jonathangray/unix-licensees
> 
> I'm guessing now that Ken's 1975 list was a list of licensees for V6, or
> perhaps those who had already received a tape.

Hi Tom,

I made an annotated bibliography of hundreds of early UNIX sources organized by
institution or publication. I created it while researching the context of the
Utah V4 tape. Since it wasn’t used for any work—it was a candidate OS for the
new graphics lab, but DEC DOS was used instead—, no one had written anything
about our early UNIX involvement and I had to search generally for other early
users. My project focuses on early users, including licensee lists, licenses,
UNIX-related publications, and graphics work.
    https://github.com/thaliaarchi/unix-history

Ken’s 1975 list is the earliest licensee list I know of. It’s a form letter file
which has templated letters that were sent to early users with variable
substitutions for each user. Although the date would suggest these are V6
licensees, it’s representative of who Ken mailed about licensing UNIX since V4.
    https://github.com/thaliaarchi/unix-history/blob/main/lists/1975-06-27_ken/y

I reverse engineered its format and am working on recovering the garbage
collected blocks. The order appears to be when he added them to the form
database, replying to batches of licensing inquiries. After finishing my
analysis, I will have a partial order of when memory blocks were written in the
file, which could hopefully reveal who was in the list before certain letters
were sent.
    https://github.com/thaliaarchi/unix-form-read

The first UNIX News list from a month later appears to be lightly reformatted
from Ken’s list, trimmed to just those who subscribed. I’ve uploaded more
legible scan of that issue I requested from Waterloo, which allowed me to
correct my transcription.
    https://archive.org/details/unix_news_july-30-1975_waterloo/page/8/mode/2up
    https://github.com/thaliaarchi/unix-history/blob/main/lists/1975-07-30_news.txt

Hopefully you can make use of this. Enjoy!

Thalia