is executed when you boot up your computer), the meat of computers today
is software.

At first, no one much cared about controlling this code. In the beginning
of commercial computing, computer companies wrote software, but that
software was peculiar to each company's machine. Each company had its
own operating system (OS, the underlying program upon which all other
programs are run). These operating systems were not compatible. A pro-
gram written for an IBM machine would not run on a Data General ma-
chine. Thus, the companies had very little reason to worry about a program
being "stolen." Computer companies were in the business of selling com-
puters. If someone "stole" a program meant for a particular computer, they
could run it only if they had that computer.

This was a world of incompatible machines, and that troubled those who
depended upon many different kinds of machines to do their work. The
government, for example, spent millions on computers but grew frustrated
that these machines could not talk with one another. The same was true of
the company that would build perhaps the most important operating system
in the history of computing: AT&T.

For in this chapter, for at least this part of this chapter, AT&T is the hero.
AT&T purchased many computers to run its national network of phones.
Because of a consent decree with the government in 1956, however, it was
not permitted to build and sell these computers itself. It was therefore de-
pendent upon the computers that others built and frustrated, like the
government, by the fact that these other computers couldn't talk to each
other.[4-3]

Researchers at Bell Labs, however, decided to do something about this.
In 1969, Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie began an operating system
that could be "ported" (read: translated) to every machine.[4-4] This operating
system would therefore be a common platform upon which programs could
run. And because this platform would be common among many different
machines, a program written once could -- with tiny changes -- be run on
many different machines.

In the history of computing, this urge for a cross-platform-compatible lan-
guage was long-standing. ALGOL was an early example.[4-5] So too was
COBOL, when the government announced that it would not purchase or
lease any computer equipment that could not run COBOL.[4-6] But the birth
of Unix -- the name given to AT&T's ur-operating system -- was the most
important. For not only did AT&T develop this foundational operating sys-
tem, it also gave it away. Because of the restrictions imposed by the 1956

[[51]]

p050 _ -chap- _ toc-1 _ p051w _ toc-2 _ +chap+ _ p052

v?