Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie created Unix at Bell Labs in 1969. They built it on a foundation of radical simplicity: small tools that do one thing well, composability, and text as the universal interface.
It grew up in a unique period of benign neglect.
AT&T was at the time a regulated monopoly. Under a 1956 antitrust consent decree, it was legally barred from engaging in any business other than common carrier communications. It could not sell software.
So it didn't. For 15 years, AT&T distributed Unix to universities for the cost of the magnetic tape and shipping — roughly $150. They included the full source code, not because of ideology, but because they couldn't charge for support. (According to legend, Thompson, free of oversight, shipped the tapes himself with notes signed "Love, Ken".)
This was decades before open source. Richard Stallman wouldn't launch the free software movement until 1983, and the term 'open source' wouldn't be coined until 1998. In Unix's early era, the economics of high-value industrial assets with zero marginal cost were not at all understood. Unix got an accidental open source start because the owner was legally forbidden from capturing the value.
This anomaly allowed the Unix scene to form. Universities modified the code, shared improvements, and trained a generation of students. By 1984, the "child" was a phenomenon, running on 45,000 systems.
Then the laws changed.
In 1984, the government broke up AT&T and lifted the consent decree. The parents now saw their child as a goldmine.
AT&T immediately commercialized Unix (System V). They tightened licensing and raised prices (universities: $800 for the first CPU; businesses: $43k for the first CPU).
Treating Unix as intellectual property to monetize rather than a platform to unify, AT&T licensed the source code to rivals, who rushed to claim the estate. Sun Microsystems (Solaris), HP (HP-UX), IBM (AIX), and DEC (Ultrix) all built their own proprietary Unix versions.
The "Unix Wars" began.
These companies did not try to grow the commons; they tried to fence it. They created incompatible versions to lock customers into their hardware. Their actions were commercially rational, but they tore the kid apart.
While the parents fought over custody, the audience left.
Microsoft offered what the Unix vendors refused to give: a single, unified standard. Windows NT (1993) swept the corporate market. By the late 90s, the proprietary Unix workstation was dying.
But the spirit survived.
In 1991, Linus Torvalds built Linux to replicate the environment he couldn't afford to buy. He wrote it from scratch — a "clean room" implementation with no AT&T code — and offered it under the GPL license to codify the conditions of Unix's childhood: a system that was free, open, and owned by no one. He made it impossible for any vendor to fence the commons again.
The proprietary Unixes killed each other. The philosophy escaped and conquered the world. We now live in the world Unix made.
2025-11-21