As hard as it seems to believe, Unix is going to be 50 this year. Once Unix escaped from the Labs and became generally known and available, there was a lot of skepticism that it would have amount to anything. You can still find and read lots of papers detailing all the problems with Unix. That continued even after it became clear that Unix was changing everything.
As a nice nice retrospective at Ars Technica points out, Unix’s influence is everywhere today. Both Android and Apple phones run on Unix derivatives and, of course, the Internet essentially runs on Unix. The article tells the story of how Unix grew out of the failed Multics effort and was, for the first part of its life, a skunkworks project that most definitely did not have the support of Bell Labs management. They didn’t even have a computer to do the work on until Ken Thompson found an unused PDP-7 in a neighboring department that he able to appropriate.
That got them going but it was very rudimentary and didn’t have any disks or even tape drives. It wasn’t until they concocted a fiction about a text processing system for the patent department that they got a decent machine to work on.
Perhaps the most fortuitous aspect of Unix was that it was developed while AT&T was still a regulated monopoly and not allowed to sell or make a profit from—among other things—computer software. That resulted in Unix being given to universities and then its escape into the wild. When AT&T was broken up, they tried to put that genie back in the bottle but it was, of course, too late and Unix came to dominate the computer operating systems space.
Take a look at the Ars Technica article. It’s tells the story of an important part of our heritage and tells it pretty much the way I have always understood it.