Free to good home: IBM RT UNIX

???

note that old operating systems and source use to be freely available. both cp67 and vm370 were free and shipped with source and source maint. some of this may be picked up with respect to hercules activity.

the big issue was the gov. (and other) litigation that resulted in the 6-23-68 plus 1 unbundling announced when application software started be priced-charged. kernel software was still bundled (and free) under the policy that it was required to operate the hardware.

i had made extensive cp67 source modifications as undergraduate and a lot of it was picked up and shipped in the product (dynamic adaptive scheduling policies, fairshare policy, working set like operationg, page replacement stuff, lots of pathlength optimization, etc). some amount of that was dropped in the morph to vm370. some amount of customer advocacy (in share user group organization and other places) resulted in being able to package and (re-)release some of it as the resource manager (in 1976). however, resource manager was tagged as the guinea pig for pricing kernel software (somewhat motivated by clone 370 processors being able to pickup free kernel). misc. past unbundling related posts

the advent of clone processors continued pressure on software and in the early 80s you started to see the "OCO" wars (object code only) where there was push to not only to charge for (unbundled) software but also to stop shipping source.

also in the early 80s, ibm formed (academic) ACIS organization ... and initially provided with $300m to give away to educational insbreastutions for computer related stuff. CMU activity got $50m (mach, camelot, andrew, etc). MIT (project athena) got $25m (project athena also got kerberos, etc). CSNET and later NSFNET backbone got some amount. Independent of CSNET (& NSFNET) there was a lot poured into BITNET (and EARN in europe). misc. bitnet & earn posts

minor specific csnet, nsfnet refs:

ACIS group was also responsible for doing BSD-based AOS for PC-RT. how much of the initial $300m, acis may have provided to ucla or Berkeley) and it was turned into AIX-370 (later aix-esa) and AIX-PS2 products.

A lot of the various IBM funded activities ... later fed into OSF (open software foundation) for stuff like DCE (distributed computing environment) which drew on mach, andrew and locus, etc work. couple random osf (open software foundation) refs:

note that cmu's mach also shows up in other places like the basis for the (current) apple operating system. in the middle of our doing ha-cmp the executive we reported to, moved over to head up somerset ... the apple, motorola, ibm, etc ... effort to do a single-chip version of rios-801-power ... somerset turned out the power-pc chips ... used by apple and for some number of other things.

i've joked in the past about ibm paying three times for transarc work ... the initial $50m grant to cmu, the initial investment when transarc was spun off from cmu, and then when they bought transarc outright.

in the late 70s there had been a big push to consolidated a wide variety of internal microprocessors to 801 risc. by the early 80s, the primary surviving was the office products effort with ROMP for displaywriter replacement using pl.8 and cpr. when the displaywriter follow-on was end, somebody observed that a lot of hardware vendors were turning out unix workstation systems with much reduced effort (doing a unix port). it was decided to retarget romp to the unix workstation market and the company that had taken at&t unix and turned out pc-ix (for the ibm-pc) was contracted to do a similar port for romp. this became the pc-rt (and the aix unix for the pc-rt ... as opposed to various other AIXs like aix-370 and aix-ps2 that came from other origins). misc. romp, rios, 801, power, posts

the pc-rt was also the target for the bsd-based AOS effort. it had initially started out as doing a port to 370. that got side-tracked to the pc-rt. however, essentially the same group also did the ucla locus stuff for aix-370 and aix-ps2. I had been doing some stuff for getting a C-language front end to the 370 pascal compiler. in the middle of this, the person left and joined metaware in santa cruz. when the aos for 370 group started up, i talked them into working with metaware for a c compiler for the port. when aos got retargeted to the pc-rt they retained the use of the metaware compiler for the effort.

random past posts mentioing metaware:

misc. past posts mentioning somerset

random past posts mentioning acis, locus, etc

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