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Technology Stocks : How high will Microsoft fly? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JC Jaros who wrote (50185)	9/29/2000 4:40:31 AM
From: Nick Kline	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74651

JCJ says - Exactly right. People hear 'breakup' and they think of AT&T shareholder experience. This ain't like that. At the end of the day, AT&T had to release it's Intellectual Property (UNIX). That's basically where the Internet started (ironically). I say - You are wrong with the idea that AT&T releasing unix helped anything I think. I don't think it was a causal relationship, and I think you aren't quite right on the facts. Before the breakup, unix was already out in the world. Remember sun saying they didn't want any new sources of unix from at&t - for a long time, they were using their own source. You might remember there used to be a zillion companies selling their own hardware, with their own slightly incompatible version of usually very crappy AT&T Sys-whatever based Unix, and a few companies selling vastly superior BSD based unixes in those days (such as sun). Sure, AT&T did stupidly sell unix off to someone (was it Novell first, I can't remember, it went from one place to another), but the internet was already going. In those days, much of the cool action was on Gnu tools (I remember in the late 80s they were talking about their own OS coming out someday, the Hurd - did that ever come out?). The availability of Linus Torvald et al to develop linux had little to do with who owned Unix. AT&T didn't give him a license to do it, after all. It was lots of factors, not least of which was the availability of cheap, well documented intel hardware that was capable of supporting a real os with protected memory, enough disk space, and they free gnu compilers. -nick