mail on his Netsys machine, which documented
all the friendly arrangements he had made with his various colleagues.

Terminus had not crashed the AT&T phone system on January 15. He was,
however, blithely running a not-for-profit AT&T software-piracy ring.
This was not an activity AT&T found amusing. AT&T security officer
Jerry Dalton valued this "stolen" property at over three hundred
thousand dollars.

AT&T's entry into the tussle of free enterprise had been complicated by
the new, vague groundrules of the information economy. Until the
break-up of Ma Bell, AT&T was forbidden to sell computer hardware or
software. Ma Bell was the phone company; Ma Bell was not allowed to
use the enormous revenue from telephone utilities, in order to finance
any entry into the computer market.

AT&T nevertheless invented the UNIX operating system. And somehow AT&T
managed to make UNIX a minor source of income. Weirdly, UNIX was not
sold as computer software, but actually retailed under an obscure
regulatory exemption allowing sales of surplus equipment and scrap.
Any bolder attempt to promote or retail UNIX would have aroused angry
legal opposition from computer companies. Instead, UNIX was licensed
to universities, at modest rates, where the acids of academic freedom
ate away steadily at AT&T's proprietary rights.

Come the breakup, AT&T recognized that UNIX was a potential gold-mine.
By now, large chunks of UNIX code had been created that were not
AT&T's, and were being sold by others. An entire rival UNIX-based
operating system had arisen in Berkeley, California (one of the
world's great founts of ideological hackerdom). Today, "hackers"
commonly consider "Berkeley UNIX" to be technically superior to AT&T's
"System V UNIX," but AT&T has not allowed mere technical elegance to
intrude on the real-world business of marketing proprietary software.
AT&T has made its own code deliberately incompatible with other folks'
UNIX, and has written code that it can prove is copyrightable, even if
that code happens to be somewhat awkward--"kludgey." AT&T UNIX user
licenses are serious business agreements, replete with very clear
copyright statements and non-disclosure clauses.

AT&T has not exactly kept the UNIX cat in the bag, but it kept a grip
on its scruff with some success. By the rampant, explosive standards
of software piracy, AT&T UNIX source code is heavily copyrighted,
well-guarded, well-licensed. UNIX was traditionally