A Chronicle of the Unix Wars

Notes:
- Per in the last video, I want to thank viewer Lance for pointing out that NeXTSTEP derives from Mach, the CMU variant of BSD.

Links:

[lance]

As a foot soldier in the Unix Wars I approve this message. So many generals, so little clue.

[ozansh_]

As a Linux user, this feels like listening to grandpa telling his Korea memories

[ManMountainMetals]

I lost 2 cousins in the Unix Wars. Their platoon was overrun on Galgam 5 by the Thrax advance. Grim days.😢

[windunursetyadi]

As a Linux daily driver, I'm glad you made this video about Unix wars where everyone at the end decides to use Linux since it was POSIX compliant without any of the headaches. Unix still alive today though trough the BSD variants and the Apple's OS family.

[iankester-haney]

I just can't feel bad for AT&T here. Their inability to see the value of UNIX cost them dearly. The lucked into the OS and then went and tried to extract massive profits from it. Microsoft realized the market could be huge if only the price were right. AT&T just constantly tried to milk the golden calf lead to all their Anti-Trust issues.

[nbnetrum]

Man as someone who followed "that" lawsuit I can never help myself but chuckle when SCO is mentioned anywhere.

[bob_mosavo]

When I came of age, it was towards the end of the Unix wars. I used SunOS, HP-UX, Solaris, NeXT STEP, and IRIX at work. For my small business, I used BSDi (386BSD), waiting for Linux to come out and become stable.
Thanks for the trip down memory lane 👍

[robertlawson]

Like all wars, it was driven by greed and selfishness. "That's MINE, get away!" says the man, clutching the disc to his chest with a menacing, hateful glare, teeth bared. But with the passing of time, the IP slipped through his fingers and he ended up with nothing.

[RalfStephan]

Fun fact, soon after Linus announced the 1st public Linux kernel, it appeared as a bootable package on mailboxes (amateur servers accessible over the telephone network) here in Germany. Compressed, with about 1MB size it fit on a floppy disk for booting a PC. It contained GNU tools like gcc v1.x and an editor, so that was the start for all the GNU software development that followed. I was there, though not prominently.

[esra_erimez]

My father came of age during the Unix wars. He ran Bill Jolitz's (RIP) 386BSD on a 386 PC he put together. Today we run various flavors of Ubuntu in the house. AT&T really dropped the ball on this one.

[TheEvertw]

The UNIX wars show like little else how bean counters destroyed a business by misreading the room, overpricing a product because they thought they could, and creating a competitor who wiped them out. All to the great detriment of the consumer.

[andrerenault]

In Cliff Stoll’s “The Cuckoo’s Egg”, one of the clues earlier on is that the hacker is using AT&T Unix commands and not Berkeley Unix commands, leading the investigation team to believe that the hacker wasn’t local.

[ebx]

This was a trip down memory lane for me. So many brilliant minds running emerging companies. Tech just isn't the same these days.

[FogelsChannel]

Wow, brilliant as usual. You absorb confusing data like a sump pump and deliver it clean and easily understood. Much thanks Leonardo.

[sixstringedthing]

Some viewers, like myself, may have a deep interest in the history of computer/data science but arrived on the scene about a decade too late to serve in the Unix Wars and were really only employed to tend the wounded and clean up the mess. To those people I say: If you've never read *The Unix-Hater's Handbook* edited by Garfinkel/Weise/Strassman, you owe it to yoursef to rectify this situation as soon as possible. Regardless of one's opinion about the OS itself, the editors who compiled the book, or the denizens of usenet who contrbuted their accounts of many vicious battles, it remains a fascinating and -sometimes- often hilarious look into the attitudes and thought processes of those who developed and used the multiple flavours of Unix in its heyday (often against their will). Highly recommended reading.

[TheUglyGnome]

Oh ... those days! Hated Unix, because it was different in every system (DEC, Sun, HP, etc). And then there was Linus. The Nerdy guy who came to the students' club room to buy his bottle of Coke few times a day. We others just wasted our time having fun, while he made history.

[MonochromeWench]

Berkeley Sockets from BSD are likely going to be around forever and will ultimately be the most important contribution of UNIX to computing as a whole. Every Operating system needs to have them as they are the standard for writing internet applications.

[kayakMike]

Bell Labs was a national treasure. So many nobel prizes and great discoveries...

[donjonmaister]

I never knew that the history of UNIX was such a shitstorm of a mess. I feel like I'll have to watch this video multiple times and take notes to comprehend all this madness. Excellent video, by the way.

[stucky]

My grandpappy fought in the UNIX wars. Spent 4 years as an ATT POW. He was never the same man afterwards.