Comment by blt
3 years ago
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.