Comment by qbasic_forever
3 years ago
UNIX was an internal and then commercial product of ATT bell labs (and later Novell). You're misconstruing it with the FOSS movement.
UNIX was created for ATT to sell more telephone service, and then later sold and licensed to other companies to likewise improve their internal computer usage. UNIX was not created to be zero cost. Apparently a commercial license for UNIX cost $20k at the time (or $150 for universities/educational institutions).
edit: IMHO $75 one time is a fair price for a premium font. Designers regularly pay $300 or more for typefaces they use in their work. There are monthly subscriptions to font foundries that cost more too.
The historical origin that I learned for UNIX was that it was created mostly out of frustration with Multics, and that its original "primary" use was running one of Ken Thompson's video games[1]. It was originally written for a PDP-7, which was already obsolete at the time and probably wasn't a target for telecommunications software.
It was only much later (and after significant arm twisting for more computing resources) that AT&T took UNIX seriously. Even then, the first marketed versions of UNIX were oriented towards programmers and technical editors, not telecommunication[2].
[1]: https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/hist.pdf
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PWB/UNIX
It was certainly not created to sell more telephone service. It was a research project that found applications to run on it, most of which had little if anything to do with telephone service at first. Much later UNIX was adapted to run telephone network equipment.
Bell labs was doing research for AT&T, a telephone service company.
Much of what Bell Labs researched had little direct application to Telephones.
Bell Labs did a tremendous amount of basic research, materials science, and things with no direct commercial application.
UNIX was created for ATT to sell more telephone service
From where did you get this idea? Citation needed.
AT&T was in the business of selling telephone service. Bell labs (AT&T owned) was where UNIX was created. Why else would AT&T be researching computer systems if not to broaden and improve their marketshare in telecommunications?
You should read Kernighan’s “UNIX A History and a Memoir”. Seriously a great book.
UNIX was created with no purpose in mind other than to get some MULTICS-like functionality out of an old machine and not worry about design-by-committee.
The first real use for it was document processing and it took off from there. Never was a telecom system ever at AT&T AFAIK and didn’t do networking until much later.
There were no “teams” there, just someone would see what someone else was working on and dive in to help. Stick a bunch of smart people in a building and see what comes out.
R&D at Bell Labs was to play with ideas first and then find an application. That’s how we got the transistor and UNIX, and waaaay more things that never saw the light of day.
That mode of R&D is dead now. It was dying even as UNIX was being developed, and they got management cover. The use for speeding up technical documentation really was the first business value justification. That was also how they managed to get the PDP-11 and how C got created for the port.
My understanding of Bell Labs is that it was funded via a 1% flat "tax" on all Bell System operating companies, and that internally it had no central mission. That's why all kinds of non-telecommunication advancements have come from it: radio astronomy, DNA sequencing machines, solar cells, etc.
I can't find an article for it, but I remember reading somewhere that AT&T's extravagant research budget and forays outside of telecommunications were partially a defensive maneuver: AT&T was aware that the US government could dismantle its monopoly at any moment, and invested heavily in R&D as a token of good faith.
So you have no idea beyond an opinion?
Big if true! Acoustic coupler modems had only existed for a few years when Unix development started, and ARPANET was starting around the same time. It would be an impressive amount of foresight if they predicted that demand for computer networking would become high and that existing OS's would be somehow ill-suited for running its infrastructure.
There were an enormous amount of problems in the telephone space that they hoped computers would resolve, like replacing the army of human operators with computer controlled switches.