Dr. Paul C. Abegglen
Department of Chemistry
University of Utah
Salt Lake City, Utah 84112

Dear Dr. Abegglen:

Thank you for your kind letter of November 21 regarding the UNIX
time-sharing system.
UNIX is a proprietary system which is available, on a cost-free basis,
to educational institutions
under license from the Western Electric Company.
To obtain a copy of the license agreement you may
write to

	Mr R. G. Shahpazian
	Room 400
	Western Electric Company
	222 Broadway
	New York, New York, 10038

You should also send a copy of your letter to

	Mr. S. P. Morgan
	...

In regard to some of your specific inquiries: essentially all the
UNIX software comes with the system.
Unfortunately, the only exceptions I can think of
relate to programs in which you expressed interest.

We have three text formatting programs. The simplest
one is based on the RUNOFF-ROFF programs which came out
of CTSS and Multics at MIT; it is reasonably powerful
and is available with the system.
The other programs use the same basic
scheme but are more powerful; the difference between them is that
one is designed for use with ordinary terminals
while the other drives a phototypesetter.
The latter two programs have not been released yet.

The TMG compiler-compiler is available with the system.
The newer YACC program, which is based on an LR(1) parsing scheme,
has not been released yet, but I suspect that
there would be no difficulty if enough interest was shown.

I wouldn't count too much on the Snobol.  It is a slightly
restricted version of Snobol III and was coded as a demonstration
for a programming course, not as a production tool.
We have made some use of it but it's pretty slow.

Making DEC subsystems run under UNIX
is likely to involve a fair amount of work.
As you must have gathered from the paper, the system interface is
completely different.
Our assembler and PAL have also grown somewhat apart,
although ours was pretty close to DEC's when it was first
written (back in the days when PAL was loaded from paper tape).
Since most of our software is written in the higher-level
language "C" we have not felt impelled to add such things as
macros to the assembler.

The PDP 11/45 you describe is sufficient to run UNIX.
I'm afraid I can't offer you any encouragement as far as the 11/20
is concerned.  The version of the system for machines
without segmentation is so different internally, and requires
so much handcrafting to adapt it to its hardware configuration,
that we are unable to support it.

The UNIX system manual has not been released for general distribution.
If the information I have given leaves
you uncertain as to the suitability of the system for
your applications, you should obtain a license
as described above, and we will be glad to send you
whatever documentation we have.

			DMR


copy to SPM
