The Creation of the UNIX* Operating System: Sharing UNIX with the rest of the world

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Sharing UNIX with the rest of the world

As UNIX spread throughout the academic world, businesses eventually became aware of UNIX from their newly hired programmers who had used it in college.

Soon a new business opportunity developed -- writing programs to run on UNIX for commercial use. What made UNIX popular for business applications was its timesharing, multitasking capability, permitting many people to use the mini- or mainframe; its portability across different vendor's machines; and its e-mail capability.

In 1984, AT&T divested itself of its local Bell telephone companies, and also created an independent subsidiary, AT&T Computer Systems. The creation of the subsidiary enabled the communications giant to enter the computer business. The new subsidiary marketed a number of computer products, including the UNIX operating system. Its software flagship was System 5, which ran on AT&T's 3B series of computers.

As the versions of UNIX grew in number, the UNIX System Group (USG), which had been formed in the 1970s as a support organization for the internal Bell System use of UNIX, was reorganized as the UNIX Software Operation (USO) in 1989. Two of the earliest applications of UNIX for telecommunications operations support systems were the Centralized Automatic Reporting on Trunks (CAROT) system and the Loop Management Operations System (LMOS), two Bell Labs efforts that monitored the health of transmission facilities in the Bell System. Other systems to quickly follow were the SARTS (Switched Access Remote Test System) and CMS (Circuit Maintenance System). In Bell Labs, the UNIX System Laboratories (USL) also was organized in 1989.

The USO made several UNIX distributions of its own to academia and to some commercial and government users, stemming from the development of the Programmer's Workbench (PWB) system. The USO in 1990 then was merged with UNIX Systems Laboratories, and the USL became an AT&T subsidiary.

A number of other computer manufacturing companies also sold UNIX computers. For example, both Sun Microsystems and SGI developed UNIX workstations, and Hewlett-Packard, NCR and IBM also sold UNIX computers.

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