What’s New in POSIX 2024 – XCU
In the 1950s, computers did not really interoperate. ARPANET has not yet happened (that would become a thing in the 60s), and every operating system was typically tied to the hardware that was meant to run on. Most communication actually happened over telephone, and no company was more present in that space than the Bell System. Unfortunately, the way they were so present was through exclusive supply contracts (with its subsidiary Western Electric) and a vast array of patents that it would refuse to license to competitors. So they got an antitrust suit aimed at them, which after seven years of litigation culminated in the 1956 consent decree. The Bell System was broken up, obliged to license all of its patents royalty-free, and barred from entering any industry other than telecommunications. So they made Unix.
Unix was unique, because the focus was on the software (since Bell couldn’t compete in this space anyway, as per the above). An evolution of Multics, it was developed on a PDP-7 (by cross-compiling). They then ported a compiler-compiler to it, leading to the development of B. Once their internal needs outgrew the PDP-7, it got ported to the PDP-11, and gained full typesetting capabilities. Gaining some traction internally, when Bell acquired other PDP-11s, instead of running DEC’s own OS for the machine, they simply ran Unix on it. This has led to the rewrite of the OS in C, a higher level (comparatively, of course) language, which enabled the porting of it to other machines (like the Interdata 7/32 and 8/32). Interest grew, and Bell (not being allowed to turn Unix into a product) simply shipped it at manufacturing cost for the media. Notably, ARPANET used it (see: RFC 681).
