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Comment by maire | Hacker News Reader

The most that would have happened is Bell Labs would have shut down the clones. There were already Unix clones in 1979. I worked on Cromix at Cromemco before I worked on Mesa/XDE at Xerox.

If I remember correctly nobody outside Xerox used Mesa or Cedar or any of the other amazing things at Xerox because Xerox never sold them. You must have worked at Xerox.

I went to Apple after Xerox and programmed in C++ using a pretty bad development environment. I certainly missed Mesa's exception handling and development environment. Mesa was missing garbage collection as did C++ at the time.

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I think Xerox was pretty renowned for their “we’re a photocopier company; we make and sell photocopiers” attitude, or they’d never have given such golden opportunities away. Much as Kodak is a photographic film company that makes and sells photographic film… oh, wait.

https://www.businessinsider.com/this-man-invented-the-digita...

But I’m sure senior management collected their fat salaries and performance bonuses as-per always, so that’s alright then.

Yeah, garbage collection came into Mesa via Cedar, with reference counting alongside a cycle collector, hence Mesa/Cedar, the replacement for XDE.

Had UNIX been a commercial product from day one, there wouldn't be any clones to start with, as they were mostly bootstrapped by the free beer source code that was taken via backup tapes from Bell Labs into a couple of collaborating universities.

I'm not sure about that. What you describe was enough to bootstrap university interest. That didn't lead Sun, Apollo, SGI, et al to decide that Unix was the right OS for making workstations, though. It didn't lead Sperry to decide that they needed to have a UNIX available on their mainframes (!) back in the mid-80s. And those were commercial licenses, not university bootlegs.

For a symbolic price, nowhere the same as something like VMS or OS/360 would cost.

Hence why AT&T went after BSD afterwards, when the the context changed and they were allowed to sell UNIX at market prices.

What are you trying to say? Are you saying that the commercial Unix licenses (to Sun et al) were only for a nominal price? Or are you saying that they were not for a nominal price, hence the BSD suit?

I agree that "the context changed" - IIRC, when the AT&T consent decree expired. That was 1982. Sun Microsystems was also founded in 1982. It was based on BSD, which had to go through the lawsuit to be proclaimed, essentially, a cleanroom Unix.

When Sun licensed from AT&T, (early 90s?) it was (I presume) at market price.

All that detail doesn't change my point: People cloned Unix because they wanted Unix. There wasn't a Berkeley VMS, not just because VMS was expensive, but because nobody wanted VMS that badly. (Why clone the thing you're getting for close to free, anyway? Doesn't it make more economic sense to clone the thing that you can't afford (VMS or OS/360), and pay the nominal price for the almost-free thing?)

People cared about Unix in a way that nobody cared about VMS or OS/360. Perhaps the ability to see the source code was part of that. But the story you're telling seems far too simplistic.

To clone UNIX, in whatever form they had to have had access to it in first place.

Which was with the tapes that flown out of Bell Labs into several universities and the commercial licenses that were almost gratis, given the price difference to other OSes.

https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/licenses.html

People keep reinventing history as if UNIX won based on merit, when it was licensing that made all the difference.

Like the fairy tale that before C no one ever did a high level systems programming language.

From personal experience Cromix was written in 6502 assembly language. The comments were all in C but personal computers were not fast enough to run a C OS in 1979. I doubt it was licensed since they reverse engineered the API (which is legal). I actually learned C by reading the comments.

Small piece of history - Cromix was written single handedly by Roy Harrington who left Cromemco to found Informix.

Having said that - Mesa/XDE was awesome. I am sure Mesa/Cedar was even better.

> People keep reinventing history as if UNIX won based on merit, when it was licensing that made all the difference.

I think you keep reinventing history as if licensing was the only thing that made the difference. I think you are badly mistaken. The licensing may have made it popular with the university crowd, but it didn't do much to move the workstation customers.

This. Well said.

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