Unix: The Bell Labs Side Project That Runs the Modern World

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In January 2026, someone cleaning out a closet at the University of Utah found a nine-track magnetic tape holding a surviving copy of Unix version 4. This episode treats that discovery as the opening of a biography: the life of an operating system that began as an unsanctioned project at Bell Labs in the late 1960s. Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Doug McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna had grown tired of Multics, the overbuilt time-sharing system from MIT, Bell Labs, and General Electric, and retreated to a spare PDP-7 to build something small enough to understand.

What they made spread for reasons both technical and accidental. Rewriting the kernel in C in 1973 freed it from any one machine, and a philosophy of small tools, plain text, and pipes made it endlessly reusable. Because a consent decree kept AT&T out of the software business, universities got the source code for $150. The episode follows the Unix Wars, the trademark lawsuits, and the free descendants that finally carried the design everywhere.

• Brian Kernighan coined the name as a pun on Multics: Unics, for Uniplexed Information and Computing Service, later respelled Unix.
• Writing a kernel in a high-level language was considered impractical in 1973, and C itself was still evolving. The payoff was the first truly portable operating system.
• AT&T charged companies $20,000 for a license but gave universities the source for $150, which let Illinois researchers tie Unix to the ARPANET and Berkeley build BSD.
• After the Unix Wars among System V, BSD, Xenix, AIX, SunOS, and HP-UX, the rights passed to Novell in 1992 and the trademark ended up with The Open Group, while the name itself appeared on diapers and hairdryers.
• Richard Stallman launched GNU in 1983 and Linus Torvalds released the Linux kernel in 1991. In a 1999 interview, Dennis Ritchie called the Linux phenomenon delightful.