Warren Toomey has a great article on The Strange Birth and Long Life of Unix in the IEEE Sprectrum. Toomey runs the Unix Heritage Society that maintains a mailing list for those interested in Unix history and, most importantly, maintains a collection of all the publicly available Unix source code.
The outline of the story is well known. When AT&T withdrew from the Multics project, Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and some of the other Bell Labs researchers were left without the convenient, interactive, time sharing system that Multics had provided and set about to create their own. What is new to me is how much of a skunk works project this was. AT&T management felt that they had been burned with Multics and were dead set against any further OS research. Thompson experimented with some of his file system and OS ideas on the GE-645 that they’d used for their Multics work but realized that the 645 would soon go away so he abandoned his work. Then, of course, he found that storied PDP-7, ported his Space Travel game to it and opened the door to what would eventually result in Unix.
Toomey relates how early Unix was in many ways like the open source movement today. AT&T couldn’t sell Unix and their lawyers were afraid that offering any support could be interpreted as violating their consent decree so fixing bugs was up to the users. Eventually those were contributed back to AT&T and incorporated into new editions. Thompson apparently even smuggled bug fixes to the users through Usenix.
Toomey tells a great story of the early days of Unix and if, like me, you’re a Unix aficionado, you’ll want to give it a read. If you’re an open source enthusiast, you’ll want to read it to see how hard people had to work to share code and knowledge in the early days. All in all, a great read for anyone interested in computers.