![]() In 1975, Ken Thompson spent a sabbatical from Bell at the University of California, Berkeley. Unix saw a rapid uptake in academic institutions. But you did get the source code-and you could modify it. The nominal costs were enough to cover the shipping and packaging and a “reasonable royalty.” Unix came “as is,” with no technical support and no bug fixes. This led to Unix being distributed as source code with a license. Because selling operating systems fell outside of AT&T’s permitted scope of operations, they couldn’t treat Unix as a product. As a result, requests for copies of Unix poured into Bell. In 1973, Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie presented a paper about Unix at a conference. This was significant because the characteristics of the C language and compiler meant it was now relatively easy to port Unix to new computer architectures. ![]() A rewrite in the C programming language led to the 1973 Version 4 of Unix. It was shortly ported to a DEC PDP/11/20 computer, then steadily spread across other computers at Bell. It was developed in Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) assembly language on a DEC PDP/7 as an unofficial project at Bell Labs, then owned by AT&T. To understand some of the influences that have shaped Unix and Linux, we need to understand their backstories. There are differences beyond the technical and architectural. The subtleties are slightly more complicated. But Linux and Unix do more or less the same thing in the same way, right? More or less, yes. Unix is a commercial product, offered by a variety of vendors each with its own variant, usually dedicated to its own hardware. Linux is a free and open-source operating system.
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