7 Mar
2020
7 Mar
'20
8:02 p.m.
Back before Digital was bought (perhaps by Compaq before HP swallowed
them both), Bob Supnik posted a free, personal use, non-commercial
license for the 36 bit line.? However, this had to be filled out and
sent to Digital's Corporate Licensing Office. As this was in 1996, it's
unclear who would be accepting delivery now...
However, there was some speculation about the licensing by some
parties.? Tops-20 was developed directly from TENEX at DEC by some of
the same employees who had developed TENEX at BBN.? However, this was
done in part with ARPA funding and licensing for TENEX was far
different.? Basically anybody could use it.? Certain KL replacement
products (viz., FOONLY) used TENEX.
XKL (or Cisco) did pay Digital a certain amount of money for use of the
TCP/IP implementation, but I don't know what rights XKL holds.? The code
bases have diverged somewhat (TOAD Tops-20 supports a 30 bit virtual
address space vs. the KL B's 23).
On 3/7/20 1:51 PM, Dave McGuire wrote:
On 3/7/20 1:45 PM, Ray Jewhurst wrote:
An interesting side question is this: what legacy
DEC oses does HPE
still own the rights to and what if anything is going to happen to those?
I
believe most (all?) of the PDP-11 OSs are, or at least were a few
years ago, owned by David Carroll. I don't know what he plans to do
with it all, if anything.
-Dave