If you see a comment someone else has submitted that you believe is not accurate, or which you can amplify with additional facts or proof, feel free to add a comment with your correction/amplification. Please provide whatever proof you can, whether as a url to historical information or by letting us know what documentary evidence you have on hand.

Any information you wish to be kept confidential, including your personal work history, will remain confidential. Information that could identify individual contributors will not be made public without permission.

What kind of information are we looking for?

1. Give Us Your Memories:

You can help by telling us what you know and what you remember.

What we are looking for is origins of features/functionality -- when exactly new features first appeared in the UNIX releases you worked on, and where exactly they came from. What do you personally remember about the origins of the thousands of innovations that make up UNIX? Anything new had to either be invented from scratch or borrowed from somewhere, or some combination of the two. We are interested in prior art, if any.

We're also interested in vendor information -- for each vendor you list, what product line(s) and major release(s) you worked on, a date range that the vendor worked on that release, and the date range you personally worked on that release. We'd like to know what hardware/compiler combination that release ran on, what new features were added for the first time in that release, whether it was the first appearance anywhere of that feature or was derived from or inspired by another vendor/product line/release. If it wasn't a first appearance, what was the derivation? (For example: "From 1979-1983 I worked at AT&T's Bell Labs and worked on _________. We based ________ on the algorithms in the _____ txt book. We got sections of _____ from Berkeley.") If you know of any litigation while you were at that vendor or during that time period, let us know.

People who have first-hand knowledge of what happened to this or that proprietary Unix flavor or the small company selling it are valuable, because we want to establish clear title to all relevant code -- even if that means proving it is in the public domain.

If you know of UNIX vendors that were acquired or went out of business and product lines were discontinued and/or licensed exclusively or sold to new vendors, please share your specific information about what happened.

Grokline will have a page called List by Feature/Function that will collect info on features and subfeatures. You will be able to submit information according to this classification scheme as well.

2. Give Us Your Code:

We have a great deal of code already, but there is some code we know is historically important but that we have not yet collected for study as source. Please offer any code you have legal authorization to donate, source and/or binary code.

If you know of other obscure code not on the list, let us know about it. We are also interested in keeping the old code-base running, so if you have information about old compilers and old but still working hardware, we are interested in that too.

3. Give Us Your Manuals, Textbooks, Documentation:

We're interested in manuals, contemporaneous legal documents, NDAs, textbooks, etc. Do you have any documentation or proof of your memories you could provide?

You can contact me at:

Pamela Jones
OSRM
730 5th Ave., 9th Floor
New York, NY 10019
pj at osriskmanagement.com