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Sharing UNIX with the rest of the world
In 1976-77, Ken Thompson took a six-month sabbatical from Bell Labs to teach as a visiting professor at the Computer Science Department at the University of California-Berkeley (UCB). What he taught, of course, was the UNIX system. While there, he also developed much of what eventually became Version 6.
The system was an instant hit, and the word spread quickly throughout the academic community.
When Thompson returned to Bell Labs, students and professors at Berkeley continued to enhance UNIX. Eventually, many of these enhancements were incorporated into what became known as Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) Version 4.2, which many other universities also bought.
UNIX had been distributed via academic licenses, which were relatively inexpensive, and government and commercial licenses from about 1975. UCB became important in spreading the word about UNIX when it established a Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG), originally under the direction of Robert Fabry. The CSRG obtained a grant from DARPA to support a version of UNIX for DARPA contractors, which were mostly academic and military organizations, and some commercial firms. Ritchie recalled, "The contractors got the UNIX licenses from Bell Labs, but they got the BSD software from Berkeley."
The CSRG did much of the real work in making the TCP/IP protocols, which are the foundations of the Internet, accessible with their BSD distributions. The expansion of UNIX into academic environments also was aided by the fact that the Digital VAX machine was at a price that academic departments could afford.
In addition, UNIX helped play a key role in the early days of the Internet, since most of the VAX computers supporting it ran on UNIX.
Next: Business gets the word
![[ UNIX building blocks ]](images/86-300838-EM.jpeg)