In 1991 AT&T incorporated the UNIX systems laboratory USL with a consortium of other companies to control the development of UNIX. I don't understand sub-this , sub-that, all the legal ramifications of it, but they formed a lot of subsidiaries and ultimately Novell ended up buying into this and is now the owner of the UNIX operating system, which I'll come to in just a minute. AT&T acquired NCR and it subsequently became AT&T GIS. It's impossible to keep all these mergers and what not straight. It was really a time of incredible change of ownership and alliances taking place in the late 80's early 90's.

In 1992 AT&T decides it doesn't need Sun anymore, because it's decided how it wants to deal with the UNIX source code, so it divests itself of it's ownership in Sun. And Digital's seen some rough items and it's founder, Ken Olsen, resigns pretty much as DEC introduces it's Alpha AXP, which was considered to be a pretty revolutionary 64-bit RISC processor. It's interesting to note that the new releases of the Intel chip are going to be 64-bit based. I don't know if it's the P6 or the P7 but the next two or three levels out will be a 64-bit processor, which is going to mean some big changes for operating system and hardware designers as well.

1993 Novell buys USL, which owns the UNIX source code and the UNIX name, from AT&T. Then they decide they'll give the name UNIX to the X/Open organization. So Novell owns the UNIX source code. X/Open owns the UNIX name and X/Open decides who can use the UNIX name. Novell has sold some source code licenses to other organizations, one of which is Sun. I'm sure they've sold others as well. The one they sold to Sun they sold for $82 million. So they probably did OK on that investment.

A little bit of trivia: Novell has sold 35,000 copies of UNIXWare 93 and Microsoft has sold 250,000 copies of Windows NT. That obviously is a war we don't know the result of yet or the winner of yet.

It was in 1993 that the Berkeley CSRG group disbanded. So the world has radically changed. All these events that made UNIX possible don't really exist anymore. There's not that consortium of free distribution. The Berkeley group, which was the catalyst and focal point that made it all happen, no longer exists. There was a source code version, if you're interested in looking at the BSD version, which is very similar to the System 5 release 4 version you can get through O'Rielly publishers and what the guys at Berkeley did, they published the source code as their final act. They said, if we're out of the game and we're not playing politics anymore, we're publishing all the source code and they were immediately sued by Novell. So they haggled over what was public and what wasn't public. They went through it subroutine by subroutine or C line by C line and said no, we wrote that, no, University of Stellenbash wrote that, no, University of Toronto wrote that, no, no, no. And they got it to the point that 90% of the source code that was in the version of BSD that they were releasing could be traced outside of Novell, who owned it at that time. So that's what's published. You can buy a CD ROM for $40 or $50 from O'Rielly Publishers and you can see 90% of the source code that's used in the operating system. One of the guys that was on the BSD team has formed a company called BSDI and they wrote the next 10-15% they needed to make it a full operating system. They sell that with the source code for $1,000 with support. They settled the lawsuit with Novell but one of the things they can't do is get near the word UNIX so it's called BSD OS but it's 90% UNIX.

Last week I was at the Uniforum conference, which is the major users group meeting for UNIX. Dennis Ritchie was there at an AT&T booth distributing a free demo disk of AT&T's new operating system called Plan 9. So now that UNIX is history, the future is Plan 9. But will events ever coalesce to make something like UNIX happen again? When you think about it, has a really successful software product occurred that was planned?

Think of the products that swept the market. DOS was an accident. Bill Gate bought that for $25,000, made some modifications to it, got royalties from IBM, and made zillions of dollars. It's not like that was a strategic plan, a strategic move in that case. He took advantage of an opportunity and the opportunity made an immense amount of money and was phenomenally successful. But if you go back and look at what you consider to be the most successful products, the most revolutionary products, they don't start out with a grand strategic plan in the market place to dominate the industry. A lot of people have tried to do it and the guy who's trying to do it now is Bill Gates.

Gates's vision is to dominate the world with Windows, Windows 95 and Windows NT. He has stated that that is his goal. "I want Windows NT to be the dominate operating system in the computer business." And I'll say to people how do you think the war is shaping up between NT and UNIX and they'll say that's no war, these operating systems can co-exist. That's nonsense. Gates doesn't want co-existence, he want's domination. That's absolutely what he wants.

The keynote speaker at Uniforum last week was the CEO of Silicon Graphics, which is a big shipper of hardware in the UNIX market place. He got up and said Silicon Graphics never has had, does not have, and never will have an NT operating system running on it's box. If that's not war, I don't know what it is. It's certainly a pretty strong battle. He's up in front of about 15,000 people frothing at the mouth, and he's using words like freedom. This is freedom. This is America. We need to protect ourselves. So I think there is a war taking place and it's going to be interesting to see how it all comes out.