Message-ID: <54CD3BE1.9050300@acm.org>
Date: Sat, 31 Jan 2015 12:32:33 -0800
From: Peter Langston <psl@acm.org>
To: Markus Armbruster <armbru@pond.sub.org>
Subject: Re: The birthdate of Empire

Markus,
    Here's a bit more detail on the availability of Empire source.
    I never even thought of distributing the HP2000 (Basic) Empire source; I
don't believe anyone ever asked for it.  I did distribute early versions of
the Unix C source that I developed at Harvard, but when I saw the kinds of
changes various (nameless) people were making, I resolved to maintain control
of the code development.  It had nothing to do with licensing.  I distributed
object code only while I continued to develop Empire at Commercial Union
Leasing Corp. (the first commercial Unix licensee) and at Davis Polk &
Wardwell (a large Wall St. law firm that I was converting to Unix).  After I
stopped developing and distributing Empire (I was just about to implement
Empire space ships that could travel between different instances of the game)
I learned of at least one group that was reverse-engineering the source and I
took pity on them and gave them my latest source code.
    I hope that helps with that part of the history.
Best,
    Peter