If you are under 30 years old, you may not remember a time when AT&T was ???the??? phone company.
Up until the early 1980s, AT&T didn??™t have to think much about competition because if
you wanted a phone in the United States, you had to go to AT&T. It had the luxury of funding
pure research projects. The mecca for such projects was the Bell Laboratories site in Murray Hill,
New Jersey.
After the failure of a project called Multics in 1969, Bell Labs employees Ken Thompson and Dennis
Ritchie set off on their own to create an operating system that would offer an improved environment
for developing software. Up to that time, most programs were written on punch cards that had
to be fed in batches to mainframe computers. In a 1980 lecture on ???The Evolution of the UNIX
Time-sharing System,??? Dennis Ritchie summed up the spirit that started UNIX:
What we wanted to preserve was not just a good environment in which to do programming,
but a system around which a fellowship could form. We knew from experience
that the essence of communal computing as supplied by remote-access, time-shared
machines is not just to type programs into a terminal instead of a keypunch, but to
encourage close communication.
The simplicity and power of the UNIX design began breaking down barriers that impeded software
developers.
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