When the AT&T code was removed, though, about 20 percent of the kernel was missing. BSD contained AT&T code, which was not open source, but the BSD elements were.Ī version of BSD without AT&T code was developed to get around these issues. Even with this cross-pollination and collaboration, there were difficulties with licensing. It included BSD code, such as TCP/IP, vi, and the C shell, csh. In 1984, AT&T was released from the strictures of the 1956 consent decree and able to market its operating system properly. Version numbers, such as 4.2BSD, identified the different releases.
Eventually, these became distributions of an entire Unix system, still known as BSD. Copies of the UC Berkeley changes and additions were distributed and became known as the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD).
Significantly, Ken Thompson spent a year there, working on what quickly became the university’s own flavor of Unix. Different flavors of Unix began to appear, adapted and tweaked to suit the organization doing the work.īob Fabry, a computer science professor at UC Berkeley, was on the program committee for the 1973 Symposium on Operating Systems Principles. He listened to a presentation by Thompson and Ritchie, entitled The UNIX Time-Sharing System.įabry requested a copy of the operating system, and, in 1974, Unix was installed on a PDP/11 at the Computer Sciences Research Group (CSRG) at UC Berkeley. So, you could get the source code, modify it, and get support from the community. As a result, a Unix community began to coalesce to help members, and patch and extend Unix. Small charges covered the shipping and packaging and a “reasonable royalty.” A Proliferation of Unixesīecause Unix was provided “as-is,” it came without support. So, the company did something remarkable for that time: distributed Unix as source code with a liberal license. Immediately they received requests for copies of the operating system.īound by a consent decree that dated back to 1956, AT&T had to eschew “any business other than the furnishing of common carrier communications services.” Unix didn’t qualify as something AT&T could profit from. That same year, Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie, two of the core Unix architects, presented a paper at a conference about operating systems. This made the operating system much more portable and easier to transfer to different hardware platforms.
Unix was created fifty years ago at Bell Labs, a research and development company owned by AT&T. Fast-forward to 1973 and Version 4 of Unix, which was rewritten in the C programming language. Who gets to decide if something is Unix or UNIX, and what criteria do they use? What is the lineage of macOS? How much of that hereditary material is still present in today’s macOS, and does it matter? Before we can begin to answer whether something is UNIX, Unix, or Unix-like, we need to be comfortable with what those terms mean. This subject raises a bunch of different questions.
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