While researching for my post The History of C Compilers, I came across another post from Diego Crespo that was sort of along the same lines. This one, Tracing the Lines: From the Telephone to Unix, follows the early history of Unix and how it fit into the history of the telephone system.
Almost from the beginning, Bell instituted a research organization in his new company. It was called the Volta Bureau but its mandate was remarkably similar to that of the Bell Labs that it would evolve into. This was in 1880.
Years later, Bells Labs was a third of the Multics Project—along with MIT and General Electric—but eventually realized that the enterprise was a dead end and withdrew. By now, it’s a well know story that Ken Thompson found himself with nothing to do and started playing around with an essentially forgotten PDP-7. It was there that he first programmed his Space Travel game and later started experimenting with optimizing disk access.
Eventually, he realized that he was 3 weeks away from an operating system. Serendipitously, his wife chose that time to take their young son to visit her parents in California for 3 weeks. When she returned, the first version of Unix had been born.
Most of this work was done in secret because, after Multics, Bell Labs management wanted nothing further to do with operating systems. Thompson wanted a bigger machine but couldn’t get approval. Then he convinced the patent office that was looking for a system to deal with Bell Labs patents that they should get the machine he wanted and his group would write the software for it. That was so successful that the patent office bought them an even bigger machine (a PDP-11) to work on.
What I like about this story is that like a lot of great systems, Unix was the result of an individual programmer’s itch. Thompson was bored so he invented Unix. Try to imagine what would happen if Unix had been a management inspired project. Actually, we don’t have to imagine. We need only look to Redmond.
If this type of thing interests you, take a look at Crespo’s post. It’s a good read.