The Wollongong Group (TWG) was one of the firs
companies
to sell commercial software products based on the

Unix Unix (; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, an ...

operating system. It was founded to market a port of Unix Version 6 developed by researchers at the

University of Wollongong The University of Wollongong (abbreviated as UOW) is an Australian public research university located in the coastal city of Wollongong, New South Wales, approximately 80 kilometres south of Sydney. As of 2017, the university had an enrolment of ...

, 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 The Internet protocol suite, commonly known as TCP/IP, is a framework for organizing the set of communication protocols used in the Internet and similar computer networks according to functional criteria. The foundational protocols in the suit ...

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 Eunice is a feminine given name, from the Greek Εὐνίκη, ''Euníkē'', from "eu", good, and "níkē", victory. Eunice is also a relatively rare last name, found in Nigeria and the Southeastern United States, chiefly Louisiana and Georgia. Pe ...

- A UNIX emulator for the VAX VMS operating system (based on software written by David Kashtan at

SRI Shri (; , ) is a Sanskrit term denoting resplendence, wealth and prosperity, primarily used as an honorific. The word is widely used in South and Southeast Asian languages such as Marathi, Malay (including Indonesian and Malaysian), Javanes ...

) * individual TCP/IP packages for: ** the VAX VMS operating system (based on

Berkeley Berkeley most often refers to: *Berkeley, California, a city in the United States **University of California, Berkeley, a public university in Berkeley, California * George Berkeley (1685–1753), Anglo-Irish philosopher Berkeley may also refer ...

TCP/IP) ** AT&T UNIX Version 7. (also based on Berkeley TCP/IP) ** 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 Cray Inc., a subsidiary of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, is an American supercomputer manufacturer headquartered in Seattle, Washington. It also manufactures systems for data storage and analytics. Several Cray supercomputer systems are listed ...

. These products, which they advertised in publications such as Computerworld and

Hardcopy Digital News was a trade publication that focused on products from Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). History They published independently from 1986 thru 1992. At that point, they were acquired and merged with '' Digital Review'' with the new ...

, 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. 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 firs
SNMP MIB (RFC1066)
Notable Wollongong technical staff that worked on these projects include David H. Crocker (

Email Electronic mail (email or e-mail) is a method of exchanging messages ("mail") between people using electronic devices. Email was thus conceived as the electronic ( digital) version of, or counterpart to, mail, at a time when "mail" mean ...

), Dr. Marshall Rose (

SNMP Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) is an Internet Standard protocol for collecting and organizing information about managed devices on IP networks and for modifying that information to change device behaviour. Devices that typically ...

Karl Auerbach Karl George Auerbach (born December 27, 1949 in Los Angeles, California) is a California attorney and internet protocol engineer who made many significant contributions to the development of the Internet, Internet governance and the commerciali ...

(

Netbios NetBIOS () is an acronym for Network Basic Input/Output System. It provides services related to the session layer of the OSI model allowing applications on separate computers to communicate over a local area network. As strictly an API, Ne ...

, 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. IPass may refer to: * I-Pass, an electronic toll collection system in Illinois, United States * iPASS (Taiwan) The iPASS (Chinese: 一卡通) is a contactless smartcard operated by the iPASS Corporation. Starting from February 13, 2017, both Eas ...

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Wollongong Group Internet technology companies of the United States Unix history Unix software