<story><title>The Berkeley Software Distribution</title><url>https://www.abortretry.fail/p/the-berkley-software-distribution</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Animats</author><text>Ford Aerospace was one of the first commercial sites of BSD Unix. The licensing was complicated. We had to buy Unix 32V from AT&amp;amp;T first.
That transaction got on the path for major corporate documents. AT&amp;amp;T and Ford Motor had a cross-licensing agreement. Eventually, I got a no-cost license agreement embossed with the corporate seals of both the Ford Motor Company and the American Telephone and Telegraph Corporation. Made a copy and taped it onto a VAX. Then I drove up to Berkeley from Palo Alto and Bill Joy gave me a BSD tape.&lt;p&gt;BSD didn&amp;#x27;t have networking at that point. We bought 3COM&amp;#x27;s UNET.[1] That was TCP&amp;#x2F;IP, written by Greg Shaw. $7,300 for a first CPU. $4,300 for each additional CPU.
It didn&amp;#x27;t use &amp;quot;sockets&amp;quot;; you opened a connection by opening a pseudo-device. UNET itself was in user space, talking to the other end of those pseudo-devices.&lt;p&gt;Once we got that going, we had it on VAX machines, some PDP-11 machines, and some Zilog Z8000 machines.
(The Zilog Z8000 was roughly similar to a PDP-11)
All of which, along with some other weird machines including a Symbolics LISP machine, eventually interoperated. We had some of Dave Mills&amp;#x27; Fuzzballs as routers [2], and a long-haul link to another Ford location that connected to the ARPANET. Links included 10Mb&amp;#x2F;s Ethernet, a DEC device called a DMC that used triaxial coax cables, and serial lines running SLIP. A dedicated 9600 baud serial synchronous line to Detroit was a big expense.&lt;p&gt;My work in congestion control came from making all this play well together. These early TCP&amp;#x2F;IP implementations did not play well with others. Network interoperability is assumed now, but it was a new, strange idea back then, in an era when each major computer maker had their own networking protocols. UNET as delivered was intended to talk only to other UNET nodes. I had to write UDP and ICMP, and do a major rewrite on TCP.&lt;p&gt;When BSD got networking, it was initially intended to talk only over Ethernet, to other BSD implementations. When 4.3BSD came out, it would only talk to some other implementations during alternate 4 hour intervals. I had to fix the sequence number arithmetic, which wrapped incorrectly.&lt;p&gt;And finally, it all worked. For a few years, it was said of the TCP&amp;#x2F;IP Internet that it took &amp;quot;too many PhDs per packet.&amp;quot; One day, on the Stanford campus, I saw a big guy with a tool belt carrying an Ethernet bridge (a sizable box in those days) under his arm, and thought, this is finally a working technology.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;archive.org&amp;#x2F;details&amp;#x2F;bitsavers_3Com3ComUN_1019199&amp;#x2F;page&amp;#x2F;n15&amp;#x2F;mode&amp;#x2F;2up?view=theater&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;archive.org&amp;#x2F;details&amp;#x2F;bitsavers_3Com3ComUN_1019199&amp;#x2F;pag...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;[2] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;eecs.engin.umich.edu&amp;#x2F;stories&amp;#x2F;remembering-alum-david-mills-who-brought-the-internet-into-perfect-time&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;eecs.engin.umich.edu&amp;#x2F;stories&amp;#x2F;remembering-alum-david-...&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>The Berkeley Software Distribution</title><url>https://www.abortretry.fail/p/the-berkley-software-distribution</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>tingletech</author><text>&amp;gt; The first copy we know to make it out of Berkeley was to Tom Ferrin at UCSF on the 9th of March in 1978. The license was signed on the 13th, the media was an 800 bpi tape, and on the tape was the “Unix Pascal system” and the “Ex text editor.”&lt;p&gt;UCSF and UCB (as well as all the UC campuses and enterprises) are technically the same legal entity, incorporated by article 9 section 9 of the California constitution.  Strange that they signed a license, when I worked for the regents we called them MOUs if it was a &amp;quot;contract&amp;quot; with another part of ourselves.&lt;p&gt;When I started working for UCSD and found out we were licensing BSDi for some boxes I was sort of confused, like why don&amp;#x27;t we get that for free?</text></comment>