Early Unix History
The cluster discusses the origins, development, licensing challenges, and historical availability of Unix, including its proprietary nature at AT&T/Bell Labs, the Unix Wars, PDP ports, and comparisons to alternatives like BSD and Linux.
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Wasn't Unix proprietary and very expensive at the time ?
You may think that, but history argues otherwise. See the Unix Wars (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_wars).
Note: unix also began as a skunkworks within a monopoly...
There was no easy to use Unix in '96
Wasn't Unix developed on PDP-7 and PDP-11?
We already had that in the 60's and 70's.It was the fact that AT&T could not charge money for UNIX and made its source available for free that changed that.Check Burroughs, Xerox PARC Star, UK Royal Navy Flex among a few others.
Unix was only rebranded in the early 80s at the exact time DOS was released. However, Unix's unintended "re-branding" was at its birth: due to its portability & availability in source, every installation was almost a "port".
See this previous thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18585922(Briefly: licensing costs for UNIX System V.)
Yes - were they doing something that Apple, Amiga and the Unix vendors weren’t?
The history at the beginning of this is not correct. Two examples: the assertion that there was one compatible UNIX prior to United States vs AT&T, the statement that GNU and BSD started that same year. Very, very off.