Newsgroups: alt.sys.pdp10,alt.folklore.computers,comp.lang.lisp,alt.os.multics
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From: bzs@world.std.com (Barry Shein)
Subject: Re: Retro-Computing!
In-Reply-To: Mark Crispin's message of Tue, 11 Apr 1995 09:23:53 -0700
Message-ID: <BZS.95Apr13034127@world.std.com>
Sender: bzs@world.std.com (Barry Shein)
Organization: The World
References: <D5yxwn.5BG@sdf.saomai.org>
	<Pine.NXT.3.92.950330155824.2916A-100000@Tomobiki-Cho.CAC.Washington.EDU>
	<D6o173.8p3@lincoln.gpsemi.com>
	<Pine.NXT.3.92.950407155823.5627A-100000@tomobiki-cho.cac.washington.edu>
	<D6q3A5.Ht9@bonkers.taronga.com> <3mcs53$sjv@nntp2.u.washington.edu>
	<Pine.NXT.3.92.950411090433.8863A-100000@Tomobiki-Cho.CAC.Washington.EDU>
Date: Thu, 13 Apr 1995 07:41:27 GMT
Lines: 56


From: Mark Crispin <mrc@CAC.Washington.EDU>
>On 11 Apr 1995, Patrick Scheible wrote:
>> I thought it had more to do with the combination of being written in a
>> portable language, and being licensed at reasonable fees?
>
>Unix was *not* licensed at reasonable fees in the early days.  It wasn't
>generally available for less than the national debt until BSD days, and by
>then DEC had already twisted the knife into TOPS-20's back. 

Not sure what you're referring to here but a full-source V6
distribution for research-only in 1976 cost $60 (sixty), including a
print-out of the manual and the tape. That was from Bell Labs. An
"administrative" academic license cost about $1000, also full
source. Not sure when the first commercial licenses came out or what
they cost but they were more expensive, a number like $25,000 comes to
mind. That was full source tho. Those prices persisted for research
and academic use, in part because they were pretty liberal about
letting you ride on your $60 V6 license until SYSV (probably SYSIII)
started coming out.  A lot of universities ran BSD on the strength of
a $60 V6 source license, I think the BSD dist cost around $400, later
$1000?

BSD days precede the 1983 end-of-twenex announcement, perhaps you're
thinking of BSD 4.2 which came out around then. But that was version
four, release 2. And release one was around at least a couple of years
before that, etc. BSD 4.1 was very popular in academia anyhow, pretty
much BSD4.2 with basically a V7 file system, no built-in network code
(obviously add-ons floated around, but the same was true of twenex at
the time, you got the BBN TCP code and integrated it yourself until
just about end-of-life when the NI20 came out and DEC started to
sort-of sanction the Twenex TCP code), but it'd (BSD4.1) be pretty
much recognizeable today.

Actually, I have the 4.1 VAX BSD release notes, they're dated May 10,
1981. The 4.0 release notes are dated November, 1980 and start with:


	This document describes briefly the changes in the Berkeley system
	for the VAX between the distribution of January 1980 (known as 3BSD)
	and this, the fourth distribution, of November 1980.

I'm pretty sure 3BSD was the first BSD version for the Vax (Bell had
released a port of V7 for the VAX slightly before, no VM, it was, um,
interesting), earlier versions were for the PDP-11 and persisted into
the late 80's (someone will probably say they still persist) with
releases like 2.11 etc.

Anyhow, that certainly pre-dates TWENEX's demise.


-- 
        -Barry Shein

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