How a discarded operating system, salvaged from the wreckage of Multics on a spare PDP-7 at Bell Labs in 1969, became the common ancestor of nearly every computer that matters today — through a fateful rewrite in C, an antitrust decree that gave it away cheap, two decades of lawsuits and fragmentation, and a free kernel that arrived just in time to inherit the world.
Bell-Labs
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The Story of Unix -
Bell Labs and the Transistor: The Lab That Built the Modern World How a regulated telephone monopoly funded the most productive industrial lab in history, why the transistor was invented twice in six weeks by people who hated each other, and how an antitrust decree turned New Jersey physics into Silicon Valley.