bell labs - or some unix history

["Dr. P. Sriram" <sriram@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, 1 Mar 2000, Oommen Thomas wrote:

> AFAIK, in 1969, when the PDP-7 or PDP-11 machine was used to develop
> Unix/C, it was in Bell Labs, which was a purely non-profit research
> organisation. Later that was taken over by AT&T who got the rights too and
> Unix was commercialised. The monopoly and breaking up are after the
> merger.

well, i was not purely relying on memory. here is the history. a.g.bell
was the fellow who invented the telephone (1876) and the bell telephone
system was offered as a service to the public soon after. in 1899, due to
tremendous growth, the company was reorganized and at&t was formed by
transfer of assets then held by bell telephone. at&t began to function as
the 'key' company of the group. the group included the local telephone
service provider (bell) also. bell labs was an independent member of the
group (independent in terms of daily management - but the money mostly
came from the parent group). several great inventions of the 20th century
came from bell labs; generally, the transistor and laser are put in this
group. given this history, i fail to understand how at&t could take over
bell labs. and if there was a merger, it was in 1899, well before anyone
had thought of unix (or even computers). in the early days, unix had a
twin track parallel development; the berkley flavour (or bsd unix) and the
bell labs flavour (or at&t unix; also known as system v). one could get
the unix of one's choice ported to available hardware. for example,
burroughs used to sell computers running at&t unix. this parallel
development is visible in many of the unices available today also. for
example in 'system v style init files' (the /etc/rc.d/ tree). some of it
is also visible in low level device names like /dev/xyz or /dev/dsk/c0r0s0
etc. fortunately for us, linux (which uses a lot of gnu tools) is a hybrid
of many of the nice features of both. 

sriram


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