Talk:Unix

Timeline errors?

Many of the dates in the Internet history timeline are incorrect, showing as 2025. At least one of the entries is not formatted correctly and appears as text, presumably due to a missing bracket. Also, a lot of the articles linked, especially towards the bottom, appear to not be incredibly important to Internet history, and probably should not be in this timeline. 108.31.15.9 (talk) 01:36, 1 June 2025 (UTC)

the Internet history timeline That comes from a template, Template:Internet history timeline; that data isn't in this article, this article just includes the template, so this isn't the right place to complain about it, and he only fix that could be made here would be to change this page not to include the template, but that wouldn't affect the template or any other pages that include the template. If you want that template fixed, ask on Template talk:Internet history timeline. Guy Harris (talk) 05:33, 1 June 2025 (UTC)

And the template 1) was removed from the article and then 2) was deleted, so the problem has disappeared along with the template. Guy Harris (talk) 08:29, 24 March 2026 (UTC)

AT&T Unix?

Have some questions about calling it AT&T Unix as that is both inconsistent with what I learned growing up and the history in this article. It was developed by Bell Labs. Jjhare (talk) 22:17, 27 September 2026 (UTC)

Bell Labs became a fully owned subsidiary of AT&T Technologies in 1984 With the breakup of the Bell System.

Starting in 1925, Ownership of Bell Telephone Laboratories was evenly shared between Western Electric and AT&T.

That being said, A Research UNIX Reader: Annotated Excerpts from the Programmer’s Manual, 1971-1986 clearly says "Since it began at the Computing Science Research Center of AT&T Bell Laboratories in 1969, the UNIX system has exploded in coverage, in geographic distribution and, alas, in bulk." and UNIX history at unix.org says "Since escaping AT&T's Bell Laboratories in the early 1970s, the UNIX system's influence has been immense." --Guy Macon (talk) 00:31, 28 September 2026 (UTC)

Starting in 1925, Ownership of Bell Telephone Laboratories was evenly shared between Western Electric and AT&T. And Western Electric was bought by AT&T in 1879 - Western Electric § 19th century says "In 1875, Gray sold his interests to Western Union, including the caveat that he had filed against Alexander Graham Bell's patent application for the telephone. The ensuing legal battle between Western Union and the Bell Telephone Company over patent rights ended in 1879 with Western Union withdrawing from the telephone market and Bell acquiring Western Electric in 1881."

Unix started out as being licensed by Bell Labs. Research Unix was not offered as a product from AT&T. Originally, it was licensed, in source form, to universities and other research institutions. Version 7 Unix (V7) was also licensed to organizations under terms where they could sell binaries for code based on V7, with a per-sublicense fee; this made it practical for them to offer V7-derived OSes. I think the binary sublicensing was done by AT&T, not Bell Labs.

UNIX System III and various version of UNIX System V were licensed under terms similar to the terms for V7; those were offered by AT&T, not by Bell Labs, and a lot of the work on System V was done by AT&T's Unix System Laboratories, not by Bell Labs. Guy Harris (talk) 05:28, 28 September 2026 (UTC)

Market share

What is the market share of the various proprietary and open source distributions, for e.g. the server, desktop, and other (high-end computing?) markets? -- Beland (talk) 15:44, 6 March 2009 (UTC)

This info is still missing from the article, other than saying Unixes overall had 90% share for supercomputers. It would also be interesting to know how this changed over time. -- Beland (talk) 01:38, 1 November 2024 (UTC)

(Unarchiving.) The article still just says Unix and Unix-like systems are popular in certain markets. -- Beland (talk) 10:54, 30 September 2026 (UTC)

How would any source know? You might find a survey with a limited sample size or a count of downloads from a particular site, but how would any source know that I have handed out more than a hundred thumb drives with Tiny Linux on them over the years? It's not like Apple, where every Mac is bought from the same company and every OS upgrade comes from the same sever -- and even they don't know that of the two used macs I have bought over the years one is working with an ancient OS and the other went into e-waste years ago. --Guy Macon (talk) 11:47, 30 September 2026 (UTC)

Minix

• Talk:Minix#"The World’s Most Widely Used Operating System" --Guy Macon (talk) 16:35, 1 November 2026 (UTC)