Companies you now know by names such
as Verizon, Qwest, and Lucent Technologies were all part of AT&T. As a result of AT&T??™s monopoly
of the telephone system, the U.S. government was concerned that an unrestricted AT&T might
dominate the fledgling computer industry.
Because AT&T was restricted from selling computers directly to customers before its divestiture,
UNIX source code was licensed to universities for a nominal fee. There was no UNIX operating
system for sale from AT&T that you didn??™t have to compile yourself.
BSD Arrives
In 1975, UNIX V6 became the first version of UNIX available for widespread use outside of Bell
Laboratories. From this early UNIX source code, the first major variant of UNIX was created at
University of California at Berkeley. It was named the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD).
For most of the next decade, the BSD and Bell Labs versions of UNIX headed off in separate directions.
BSD continued forward in the free-flowing, share-the-code manner that was the hallmark of
the early Bell Labs UNIX, while AT&T started steering UNIX toward commercialization. With the
formation of a separate UNIX Laboratory, which moved out of Murray Hill and down the road to
Summit, New Jersey, AT&T began its attempts to commercialize UNIX.
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