The Wollongong Group

Last updated

The Wollongong Group (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.

Contents

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. [1]

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:

Individual licensing arrangements were made with brand-name vendors such as Philips for the P9000 Unix offerings, and Cray Research. [4]

These products, which they advertised in publications such as Computerworld [5] [6] and Hardcopy, [7] were among the first commercially supported systems of their type, allowing people other than software developers access to the Internet. The PC product in particular made it possible for a non-technical user to access the Internet with equipment costing less than $3000 - about one tenth the cost of any other available systems at the time.

Original Internet work

PATHway was the name they used for a specialized TCP/IP product. [8]

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.

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Digital Equipment Corporation</span> U.S. computer manufacturer 1957–1998

Digital Equipment Corporation, using the trademark Digital, was a major American company in the computer industry from the 1960s to the 1990s. The company was co-founded by Ken Olsen and Harlan Anderson in 1957. Olsen was president until forced to resign in 1992, after the company had gone into precipitous decline.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">OpenVMS</span> Computer operating system

OpenVMS, often referred to as just VMS, is a multi-user, multiprocessing and virtual memory-based operating system. It is designed to support time-sharing, batch processing, transaction processing and workstation applications. Customers using OpenVMS include banks and financial services, hospitals and healthcare, telecommunications operators, network information services, and industrial manufacturers. During the 1990s and 2000s, there were approximately half a million VMS systems in operation worldwide.

Network File System (NFS) is a distributed file system protocol originally developed by Sun Microsystems (Sun) in 1984, allowing a user on a client computer to access files over a computer network much like local storage is accessed. NFS, like many other protocols, builds on the Open Network Computing Remote Procedure Call system. NFS is an open IETF standard defined in a Request for Comments (RFC), allowing anyone to implement the protocol.

DECnet is a suite of network protocols created by Digital Equipment Corporation. Originally released in 1975 in order to connect two PDP-11 minicomputers, it evolved into one of the first peer-to-peer network architectures, thus transforming DEC into a networking powerhouse in the 1980s. Initially built with three layers, it later (1982) evolved into a seven-layer OSI-compliant networking protocol.

Systems Network Architecture (SNA) is IBM's proprietary networking architecture, created in 1974. It is a complete protocol stack for interconnecting computers and their resources. SNA describes formats and protocols but, in itself, is not a piece of software. The implementation of SNA takes the form of various communications packages, most notably Virtual Telecommunications Access Method (VTAM), the mainframe software package for SNA communications.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Xenix</span> Discontinued Unix version published by Microsoft

Xenix is a discontinued version of the Unix operating system for various microcomputer platforms, licensed by Microsoft from AT&T Corporation in the late 1970s. The Santa Cruz Operation (SCO) later acquired exclusive rights to the software, and eventually replaced it with SCO UNIX.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ultrix</span> Series of discontinued Unix operating systems by DEC

Ultrix is the brand name of Digital Equipment Corporation's (DEC) discontinued native Unix operating systems for the PDP-11, VAX, MicroVAX and DECstations.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">IBM RT PC</span> Early RISC workstation from IBM

The IBM RT PC is a family of workstation computers from IBM introduced in 1986. These were the first commercial computers from IBM that were based on a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) architecture. The RT PC uses IBM's proprietary ROMP microprocessor, which commercialized technologies pioneered by IBM Research's 801 experimental minicomputer. The RT PC runs three operating systems: AIX, the Academic Operating System (AOS), and Pick.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">FTP Software</span> Defunct software company

FTP Software, Inc., was an American software company incorporated in 1986 by James van Bokkelen, John Romkey, Nancy Connor, Roxanne van Bokkelen, Dave Bridgham, and several other founding shareholders, who met at Toscanini's in Central Square after an email went out over the Bandykin mailing list looking for people interested in starting a company. Their main product was PC/TCP, a full-featured, standards-compliant TCP/IP package for DOS. The company was based in Andover, Massachusetts. It also had a number of offices throughout the United States and overseas.

Local Area Transport (LAT) is a non-routable networking technology developed by Digital Equipment Corporation to provide connection between the DECserver terminal servers and Digital's VAX and Alpha and MIPS host computers via Ethernet, giving communication between those hosts and serial devices such as video terminals and printers. The protocol itself was designed in such a manner as to maximize packet efficiency over Ethernet by bundling multiple characters from multiple ports into a single packet for Ethernet transport.

Cincom Systems, Inc., is a privately held multinational computer technology corporation founded in 1968 by Tom Nies, Tom Richley, and Claude Bogardus.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">History of Unix</span>

The history of Unix dates back to the mid-1960s, when the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, AT&T Bell Labs, and General Electric were jointly developing an experimental time-sharing operating system called Multics for the GE-645 mainframe. Multics introduced many innovations, but also had many problems. Bell Labs, frustrated by the size and complexity of Multics but not its aims, slowly pulled out of the project. Their last researchers to leave Multics – among them Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Doug McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna – decided to redo the work, but on a much smaller scale.

TCPware is a third party layered product published by "Process Software LLC" to add TCP/IP capabilities to OpenVMS. The need for such a product may seem obvious today but back in the early 1990s Digital Equipment Corporation had an internal policy favoring their own product called DECnet. Meanwhile, many VMS users in governments, large corporations and universities were discovering the "TCP/IP based" internet and required third party software to enable connectivity to it.

Network Systems Corporation (NSC) was an early manufacturer of high-performance computer networking products. Founded in 1974, NSC produced hardware products that connected IBM and Control Data Corporation (CDC) mainframe computers to peripherals at remote locations. NSC also developed and commercialized the HYPERchannel networking system and protocol standards, adopted by Cray Research, Tektronix and others. In the late 1980s, NSC extended HYPERchannel to support the TCP/IP networking protocol and released a product allowing HYPERchannel devices to connect to the emerging Internet.

Barry Appelman is recognized as being the father of the "buddy list" and AOL instant messenger. Companies had been using crude forms of Instant messaging within their own networks for over forty years, but the idea of presence, i.e. who is logged on at any given time, was non existent. It was not until Appelman, and his colleagues at the Thomas Watson Research Center, first began to write programs on the mainframe system letting each other know when they were actually online, that modern day Instant Messaging was born.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Britton Lee, Inc.</span>

Britton Lee Inc. was a pioneering relational database company. Renamed ShareBase, it was acquired by Teradata in June, 1990.

InterCon Systems Corporation was founded in April 1988 by Kurt D. Baumann and Mikki Barry to produce software to connect Macintosh computers in environments that were not Macintosh-exclusive. At the time, there was no real concept of the Internet and there was still a question of whether the TCP/IP protocols or OSI protocols would be adopted widely. Over the next 9 years, the company grew from three employees to over 100 and sold software in the US, Europe and Japan.

NetManage Inc. was a software company based in Cupertino, California, founded in 1990 by Zvi Alon, an Israeli engineer. The company's development centre was located at the MATAM technology park, in Haifa, Israel. In June 2008 the company was acquired by Micro Focus International, a British company based in Newbury, Berkshire.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">GroupWise</span> Messaging and collaborative software platform

GroupWise is a messaging and collaboration platform from Micro Focus that supports email, calendaring, personal information management, instant messaging, and document management. The GroupWise platform consists of desktop client software, which is available for Windows,, and the server software, which is supported on Windows Server and Linux.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">History of computer clusters</span>

The history of computer clusters is best captured by a footnote in Greg Pfister's In Search of Clusters: “Virtually every press release from DEC mentioning clusters says ‘DEC, who invented clusters...’. IBM did not invent them either. Customers invented clusters, as soon as they could not fit all their work on one computer, or needed a backup. The date of the first is unknown, but it would be surprising if it was not in the 1960s, or even late 1950s.”

References

  1. ↑ "Attachmate Buys Wollongong To Expand Scope Of Software".
  2. ↑ "Legacy Connectivity". Network Computing .
  3. ↑ "THE WOLLONGONG GROUP INC, PALO ALTO, CALIFORNIA, HAS SIGNED A DISTRIBUTION AGREEMENT WITH PHILIPS INFORMATION SYSTEMS". August 21, 1990.
  4. ↑ Borman, David A. (1989). "Implementing TCP/IP on a Cray computer". ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review. 19 (2): 11–15. doi: 10.1145/378444.378446 . S2CID   16856026.
  5. ↑ "Computerworld Ad". Computerworld . December 5, 1983. p. 95.
  6. ↑ "Computerworld Ad". Computerworld . September 12, 1983. p. 121.
  7. ↑ "Hardcopy Ad". Hardcopy . August 1983. p. 41.
  8. ↑ "Wollongong: PATHway for VMS". Computerworld . October 5, 1992.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.