If nothing else, choices that might seem wrong-headed or perverse today can often be seen as natural consequences of what was understood and could be accomplished with the resources available at the time.

Long-term View

AT&T / Bell Labs had a very long-term view and an “unfettered environment for exploration” no matter how unconventional.

I think that it would be easier to move Unix to another piece of hardware than to rewrite an application to run under a different operating system - Dennis Ritchie

This was different from what was typical at the time. Software was written specifically for the hardware that it was run on. Primarily because a lot of software was written in low-level language specific to the hardware. Conversely, Unix, was re-written in C which could be compiled to low-level instructions specific for the hardware.

Management

The lack of explicit management was standard practice at Bell Labs. Bells Labs had a broad but clear mission, “universal service”. There was a lot of trust that people were interested in achieving this mission.

… no research proposals, no quarterly progress reports, and no need to seek management approval before working on something.

As Dick Hamming said, if you don’t work on important problems, it’s unlikely that you’ll do important work.

The Culture

Brian talks about how he felt that he was a below-average intern after his final year of college at Imperial Oil. He spent the entire summer trying and failing to get a COBOL program to analyze data. I personally have stories just like this where I struggled early on in my programming career with what now seems obvious. One task in particular that I remember receiving was to transform “large” JSON log dumps. If I remember correctly, it took me roughly a month to write a program that did this.

At Bell Labs, everyone, even the “famous” people, took time to listen to, speak and work with, interns.

Everyone gave generously of their time, it was simply part of the culture that you provided detailed comments on what your colleagues wrote.

Writing was especially important at Bell Labs and the spread of both Unix and C.

Brian played an important role in the success of Unix and C by unofficially being, what the industry now calls, a Developer Advocate. Writing that was published externally was one of the primary recruiting mechanisms. Writing was part of the process that was respected and given time at Bell Labs. There were close ties to academia and you were expected to write papers, give talks and even teach courses at universities.

External visibility was important for recruiting…Secretive companies had a harder time attracting talent.

We could only hire one or two people a year, and almost always young ones.

On whether Bell Labs was more interested in specialization or generalization, Steve Johnson once asked, “should we be hiring athletes or first basemen?

Brian said that his preference was always for people who were good at what they did, without worrying too much about what specifically it was.

Constraints

If nothing else, choices that might seem wrong-headed or perverse today can often be seen as natural consequences of what was understood and could be accomplished with the resources available at the time.

If resources are tight, that’s more likely to lead to good, well thought-out work than if there are no constraints.

This was a major contributing factor to the design of Unix, but also a way to get teams and departments to work together to collectively achieve some goal. The Unix department tried to get funding for a new computer, specifically, to upgrade from the PDP-7 to the PDP-11. They were denied multiple times for funding.

Bell Labs had an active patent department and the Unix team knew that they were considering buying new, expensive, patent-specific hardware. The Unix team saw this as an opportunity to get what they wanted, a PDP-11. The Unix team convinced the patent department to purchase a PDP-11 and the Unix team agreed to write the patent-printing software for the general-purpose hardware. The patent printing department would use the hardware during the day and the Unix team had free rein over the hardware in the evening to build and test software. This became difficult because the patent department relied on this hardware, so if the software broke, then the department couldn’t work. Keep in mind that this was before proper version control, so easily rolling back to a working version of the software was difficult. Eventually, the patent department bought a PDP-11 for the Unix department to build and test software.