One too many words on AT&T's $2k Korn shell and other Usenet topics

Summary

Usenet provides a window into the Unix and BSD systems of the 1980s, and some of the hardware that they ran on. Discussions were slow. Computers were expensive. GNU Emacs was big. AT&T charged a lot of money. Usenet was fun.Unix has been enormously successful over the past 55 years.It started out as a small experiment to develop a time-sharing system (i.e., a multi-user operating system) at AT&T Bell Labs.1 The goal was to take a few core principles to their logical conclusion.2 The OS bundled many small tools that were easy to combine, as it was illustrated by a famous exchange between Donald Knuth and Douglas McIlroy in 1986. Today, Unix lives on mostly as a spiritual predecessor to Linux, Net/Free/OpenBSD, macOS,3 and arguably, ChromeOS and Android.Usenet tells us about the height of its early popularity.A casual economics of UnixUnix was not the product of a competitive market.First of all, AT&T was a monopoly. It had the opportunity to allocate a share of its monopoly rent to Bell Labs, concentrating funding toward experimental projects like early Unix.But AT&T was also a regulated monopoly. It was allowed to be a monopoly in telecom but prohibited from operating a non-telecom business. This prevented AT&T from commercializing Unix. Instead, it offered a source license to universities at a relatively low fee.At the same time, universities and the US government (specifically ARPA) had a shared desire for a flexible and portable operating system. Funding from the Department of Defense allowed UC Berkeley’s CSRG to pay graduate students to build such an OS upon AT&T’s codebase. The resulting OS was called Berkeley Software Distribution, or BSD.BSD was really good. It pushed the envelope on what Unix could be, and AT&T eventually had to adopt BSD improvements and extensions like demand paging (mentioned later), disk quotas, sockets, job control, or the Vi editor (mentioned later), because AT&T’s home-grown System III and System V were too limited without them.The V...