Really. Go find it. I’ll wait.
Couldn’t find it? Settings > General > About > Legal > Legal Notices. Scroll waaaaaaaay down. Eventually you’ll hit this –
update – in 2022 it’s in Settings > General > Legal and Regulatory > Legal Notices
That’s right, Steve Hayman of the Indiana University Computer Science Department.
What’s all that about?
In 1989 or so I was working at Indiana University as a network manager in the computer science department.
We had a fleet of Apollo and Sun workstations, and one or two of these weird NeXT cube things, which I wound up getting to know pretty well but that’s another story.
University of California, Berkeley had a popular variant of the UNIX system, which we used at IU on our Suns, including the Sun 3/60 on my desk, that happened to be based extensively on AT&T’s System V.
Berkeley wanted to get rid of the AT&T parts so that they could make it truly open-source and unencumbered by the AT&T license restrictions, so they put out a call for volunteers to rewrite certain AT&T programs from scratch.
(The rules were: you were allowed to study and run the original, and look at the man page, but you couldn’t look at the original AT&T source code.)
Along with many other people who were much better programmers than me, I volunteered, and they asked me to take a stab at rewriting /usr/games/bcd, which was a silly little program that took text and drew a fake punch card around it.
BCD stands for Binary Coded Decimal, which was the text encoding standard that evolved into EBCDIC (Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code), as used on punch cards, which I actually used in my first year Waterloo computing course on Fortran, and you would perhaps have liked the conference talk I gave at MacSysAdmin on the history of text encodings from Morse Code to Emoji – but more importantly – this bcd program qualified as high concept computer geek humor back in the day.
Also it was in /usr/games! What exciting computer games we had in those days!
AT&T Unix came with this utility, and I volunteered to rewrite it, and submitted the code to Berkeley.
They seemed happy with it and asked me to do another so I also rewrote /usr/bin/join, which is a sort of command line version of the database join function.
(That one was way more useful but way less fun to demo.)
Weirdly, the AT&T version only created 48-column cards instead of the standard 80-column card, but I was intent on copying the AT&T version, so if you ever look at the source you should change this line
int columns = 48;
So anyway I kind of forgot about it, but here we are, decades later.
Berkeley UNIX has continued to evolve, and a lot of the Berkeley code found its way into Linux, and MacOS, and even iOS.
Needless to say, iOS doesn’t actually include either the bcd or join programs, but it does include a lot of other Berkeley Unix code.
Apple lists the license agreement and credits for a ton of open source code in its Legal Notices section, and Berkeley, god bless them, has chosen to include the names of all these contributors from long ago. The Berkeley section says This code is derived from software contributed to Berkeley by …. and lists dozens of people, virtually all of whom did something way more important than I did.
But there it is.
I’m sure hardly anybody reads the Legal Notices but it’s the first thing I check when there’s a new iOS release. Just making sure things are still there.
postscript
Berkeley unix mutated into OpenBSD and FreeBSD and NetBSD and Linux and MacOS and iOS and watchOS and tvOS and I can’t keep track of it all – but you can see the OpenBSD version of the BCD source here.
I am really amused that in my efforts to copy the AT&T version exactly, I inadvertently copied a bug from the original! Four years later, Dyane Bruce noticed (and fixed) that Q and R were being punched the same way! ooops.