From the beginning

In 1969 employees at AT&T/Bell Labs developed the first version of Unix. The original intention was to aid the company’s internal development of software on and for multiple platforms, but over time Unix evolved to be a very widespread and powerful operating system, which facilitated distributed computing. An important reason for the successful proliferation of Unix was that for antitrust reasons AT&T was neither allowed to sell Unix nor to keep the intellectual property to itself [1]. In consequence Unix – in source code – was shared with everybody interested.

It was especially, but not only, embraced by universities and the community that evolved provided the basis for the computing environment we are used to today and in which also Ethernet has its place. At a time when computing was dominated by large, proprietary, and very expensive mainframe computers few people could use, Unix created a demand for Local Area Networking (LAN) while at the same time providing an affordable, common platform for developing it [2]. As one example, a group at the University of California, Berkeley created a Unix derivative. The Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) was first released in 1978 and its evolutions became as established as the “BSD-style license” attached to it [3]. Another example is the TCP protocol. The first version of this, published in 1974, was implemented for Unix by the University of Stanford by 1979 [4]. Later in 1989, the then up-to-date TCP/IP code for Unix from AT&T was placed in the public domain and thus significantly helped to distribute the TCP/IP Internet Protocol Suite [5].