Comment by pjmlp

Free beer OS with source tapes and the Lions book made the huge following of academics and young professionals.

Had AT&T been able to sell UNIX, and naturally C, at the same price points as VMS, System 360, and many other contemporary OSes, and none of us would be talking about them today, other than history curiosities.

Instead we are left with UNIX haters handbook, and still trying to fix the security issues across the industry caused by C's adoption, the JavaScript and PHP of systems programming languages, both in adoption scale, and code quality.