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The Wollongong Group

The Wollongong Group, Inc. (TWG), was one of the first companies to sell commercial software products based on the Unix operating system. It was founded to market a port of Unix Version 6 developed by researchers at the University of Wollongong, Australia (thus the name "Wollongong Group"). The company was active in Palo Alto, California from 1980 to 1995.

It later achieved name recognition as a pioneer in developing and selling commercial versions of the TCP/IP protocols. The Wollongong Group had annual sales of $40 million and employed 165 people when it was acquired by former competitor Attachmate in 1995.

Commercializing TCP/IP and the Internet

Virtually all Wollongong's products were initially based on versions of software that had been developed at Universities and released into the public domain. Wollongong products included:

  • Eunice - A UNIX emulator for the VAX VMS operating system (based on software written by David Kashtan at SRI)
  • individual TCP/IP packages{{cite magazine |magazine=Network Computing
    • the VAX VMS operating system (based on Berkeley TCP/IP)
    • AT&T UNIX Version 7. (also based on Berkeley TCP/IP){{cite web
    • the IBM PC (Based on MIT PC-IP by John Romkey)

Individual licensing arrangements were made with brand-name vendors such as Philips for the P9000 Unix offerings, and Cray Research.{{cite journal

These products, which they advertised in publications such as Computerworld{{cite news |newspaper=Computerworld

Original Internet work

PATHway was the name they used for a specialized TCP/IP product.{{cite news |newspaper=Computerworld

By the mid 1980s many Wollongong employees were active in developing new Internet Technologies. Wollongong Employees produced the first Internet tunneling specification (RFC1088) and the first SNMP MIB (RFC1066). Notable Wollongong technical staff that worked on these projects include David H. Crocker (Email), Dr. Marshall Rose (SNMP), Karl Auerbach (Netbios, SNMP), Narayan Mohanram (TCP/IP on UNIX), Jerry Scott (TCP/IP on VMS), Leo McLaughlin III and John Bartas (TCP/IP on IBM PC). Internet Technology companies founded by ex-Wollongong employees include Epilogue Technologies, Taos Mountain Software, Interniche Technologies and iPass Inc.

References

References

  1. Staff writer. (October 20, 1980). "Unix, SCCS Supported by PE 32-Bit Supermini". IDG Publications.
  2. Reinfelds, Juris. "The First Port of Unix". Department of Computer Science, The University of Wollongong.
  3. "Attachmate Buys Wollongong To Expand Scope Of Software".
Wikipedia Source

This article was imported from Wikipedia and is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Content has been adapted to SurfDoc format. Original contributors can be found on the article history page.

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