[TUHS] List of earliest UNIX licensees?

[Ron Natalie via TUHS]

Some of the names on that list bring back memories.    Bill Huggins was 
one of my professors at JHU.   I suspect he was on the license as he. 
Was chair of the EE department (Hopkins had no CS department at the 
time.  If you wanted to do computers you were either in EE or math).  He 
wasn’t a Unix guy mainly but a RSTS Basic Plus guy.   It was a deal we 
made to get basic running on emulation on UNIX that allowed us to run 
UNIX full time.

Bill confided in me to not ever move when you were as old as he was (I 
was only 20 at the time).  He says he was forced to shuffle through 
things that he knew then he would never finish.




------ Original Message ------
From "Thalia Archibald via TUHS" <tuhs at tuhs.org>
To "Tom Lyon" <pugs78 at gmail.com>
Cc "Jonathan Gray" <jsg at jsg.id.au>; tuhs at tuhs.org
Date 2/19/2026 21:38:56
Subject [TUHS] Re: List of earliest UNIX licensees?

>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