On Thu, Apr 2, 2009 at 11:53 PM, Pablo Manalastas <prmanalas...@yahoo.com> wrote: .. > Prior to 1981, AT&T was only too glad to get contributions > to the Unix source code from academe, specifically from > UCBerkeley. They were not barred from selling hw and sw > prior to 1981 because the court ruling came only in 1982 > and was truly implemented only in 1984, when they spun off > their local Bell telephone companies, not the software group. from here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Telephone_%26_Telegraph
"In 1949, the Justice Department filed an antitrust suit aimed at forcing the divestiture of Western Electric, which was settled seven years later by AT&T's agreement to confine its products and services to common carrier telecommunications and license its patents to "all interested parties". A key effect of this was to ban AT&T from selling computers despite its key role in electronics research and development." The 1982 court ruling divested AT&T of the RBOC's in other words they were no longer the LEC. Because of this removal of their phone line monopoly, they became free to sell computers and software, which they had started doing a year earlier anyway with System III Unix. > AT&T never gave away either Unix source code or binary > executables after 1981, even after the court ruling. In fact > the period after 1981 was the height of the Unix popularity > when Unix licenses were being sold as Sun Solaris, HP-UX, > DEC Digital Unix, IBM AIX, etc. After 1985, when Ateneo got > its first Unix license, we could only afford to buy SCO Unix > on Intel 386, because we could only afford Intel, but we > nevertheless had to pay for the commercial SCO Unix license. Actually we're both talking about the same thing, albeit from different angles. And we do agree that post-1981 (in other words, when AT&T was allowed to sell Unix already) they no longer gave it away because it became a profit center for them. -- Orlando Andico +63.2.976.8659 | +63.920.903.0335 _________________________________________________ Philippine Linux Users' Group (PLUG) Mailing List http://lists.linux.org.ph/mailman/listinfo/plug Searchable Archives: http://archives.free.net.ph
