Chapter 6 · 1982–1994

The deal ends

The breakup freed AT&T from the walls of 1956. Within months, the thing that had escaped as a side effect got fenced in as a product.

Every deal ends. The government came back for AT&T in 1974, and this time it didn’t settle for walls. After eight years of litigation in Judge Harold Greene’s courtroom, AT&T agreed in 1982 to break itself up. On January 1, 1984, the Bell System — the biggest company on Earth, the deal of 1913, all of it — split into seven regional phone companies and a smaller AT&T.

Say the honest thing first: for consumers, the breakup mostly worked. Long-distance prices fell hard. Competition arrived. You could buy your own phone instead of renting one forever. In the story this book tells, the breakup plays the villain — but in the story of your grandparents’ phone bill, it was the hero. Both are true, and pretending otherwise would be cheating.

Here’s why it plays the villain here. The breakup dissolved the 1956 decree. The walls came down — including wall two, the one that barred AT&T from selling software. And AT&T had spent fifteen years watching universities and companies fall in love with a piece of software it had been legally forced to give away for the price of a tape. Unix was suddenly a product. Enclosure began within months.

The license timeline below shows the whole strange decade: one artifact, Unix, getting more open and more closed at the same time, in two different institutions. On the AT&T side, prices climbed from media fees to serious money — a commercial source license ran into six figures. The tapes-and-goodwill era was over. On the Berkeley side, the university’s branch — BSD, built by grad students on top of those old cheap tapes — moved the other way, stripping out AT&T’s code piece by piece and releasing what remained, free, to anyone.

One man had seen it coming before the breakup even landed. Richard Stallman, a programmer at MIT, had watched his own lab’s software culture die by license agreement, and in 1983 he announced a plan most people found quixotic: rebuild all of Unix, from scratch, as free software — free meaning freedom to read, change, and share the source code, not free of charge. He called the project GNU and spent the rest of the decade building it: a compiler, an editor, the tools, the libraries. He also built a legal weapon, the GPL, a license that used copyright against enclosure — you may use this code in your software only if your software passes on the same freedom. By 1991, GNU was substantially complete. Except for one piece. There was no kernel — no core. A whole toolshed, and no engine.

BSD should have filled the hole. By 1991 Berkeley had released Net/2 — an almost-complete free Unix, six files short. And then, at exactly the wrong moment, the enclosure reached for it. In 1992, AT&T’s software subsidiary sued BSD’s commercial spin-off over copied code and trademarks. The suit was thin — it settled in 1994 with BSD nearly vindicated, and 4.4BSD-Lite shipped clean. But for two years, the years that mattered most, the free branch of Unix sat frozen under legal cloud. Nobody builds on a foundation that might be confiscated.

So hold the picture at the end of 1992. The hardware is cheap — chapter 3’s doubling has put a real computer on ordinary desks. GNU has built everything except a kernel. BSD, the obvious kernel, is wrapped in a lawsuit. Millions of people are learning to program on machines that deserve a real operating system and can’t afford one. History has left a kernel-shaped hole, with lawyers standing in front of the obvious way to fill it.

The hole gets filled from the least obvious direction imaginable: a student bedroom in Helsinki. Next chapter.