The Godfather of Open Source

I want to tell you a story about your father and grandfather that you probably don’t know. It is why he is the Godfather of Open Source.

If the internet didn’t exist, there would be no Facebook, no Google, no turn by turn directions, no newsfeeds, no instant messaging, no Facetime, no Ring security systems, and no Amazon. In fact, the whole notion of “online” wouldn’t exist. Nada.

Why am I telling you all of this? At the core of millions of internet servers is a piece of software dating back to the late 1960’s. It was invented at AT&T’s Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, NJ. It’s called UNIX. It (and all of its variants like Linux and Ubuntu) still powers literally everything from cloud computing to mobile devices to medical equipment. It is at the heart of all Apple and Google products. If you were to peel all the layers of any smart device, at the core you’ll find a piece of UNIX.

What you may not know is it almost didn’t happen. Back in the 1960’s few people outside of AT&T and academia really knew what software was. It was a novelty. UNIX was developed to control telephone switching and billing systems. That was its sole purpose. It wasn’t developed for use outside of AT&T. The two developers, Dennis Ritchie and Scott Thompson, had no grand plans to change the world. But they were happy to share their “project” with their colleagues, whether they were at Princeton, Carnegie Mellon, University of Illinois, UC Berkeley or IBM. It was the 1960’s. Free Love was in the air. It was the Age of Aquarius and the Beatles’ Come Together.

And keeping with the free love idea, with all these people having access to a common software code base, they collaborated with one another to make UNIX better, extend its capabilities, and fix bugs. Ever heard of “open source?” Well, this is where it began. That’s why UNIX is so important. No UNIX, no open source. No open source, none of the products I mentioned.

Ritchie met colleagues at conferences and then they’d later send him a handwritten note requesting a copy of UNIX. He’d make a duplicate of the software onto a large tape reel (this is long before CDs and hard drives, folks) and drop it in the mail with a personal note. That’s how software was distributed pre-download.

As word got around that Richie and Thomson had some far out, cool software that they were willing to share — for free — those universities and companies came looking for a legal license from AT&T.

Everything I’ve told you so far is well known. You can learn about it on Wikipedia. But here’s the untold story your father and grandfather related to me over your mom’s birthday dinner at Fisherman’s Inn, Elburn, Illinois September 1981.

Enter Jack Bolt. An engineer, former Navy ensign and program manager of the United States Safeguard Program, which AT&T’s Western Electric was prime contractor, based out of their Winston-Salem manufacturing plant at 3300 Lexington Rd. Safeguard installed missile silos throughout the US in the height of the Cold War. In 1971, Safeguard was abruptly canceled which led to Jack and family’s relocation to Basking Ridge, New Jersey and Jack’s position in AT&T’s patent licensing department 222 Broadway — The Western Electric building — in Manhattan.

So when the request for licensing UNIX came to the patent licensing office, whose desk did that request land on? Yep, your father and grandfather, Jack Bolt.

While Jack was an engineer, he had no notion of what software was. He did know AT&T wasn’t in the software business. Besides that, UNIX was a complete anomaly. Operating systems like UNIX didn’t exist. It was a complete aberration, in that it was portable between computers of all makes and models. I won’t nerd out on you right now, but suffice to say, UNIX was novel. And when you have something novel, you think patents and licensing and dollars and cents.

But Jack didn’t look at UNIX that way. To him, it was, “One more waste of time and money boondoggle from Bell Labs.” Bell Labs had a well deserved reputation for creating things that no one wanted. Bell Labs was principally funded by an internal cost-transfer system (think: tax) from Western Electric to Bell Labs. To a Western Electric man like Jack, it was a bitter pill to swallow. The corporate animosity is well documented.

So, to Jack, UNIX was just one more waste-of-time nuisance.

“What did you do,” I asked.

“Well, I called Ken Olsen, at DEC.” DEC, or Digital Equipment (now part of HP), was a popular computer company back then, a rival of IBM. Ken was DEC’s co-founder and CEO. “I asked Ken if he’d like to buy it for $250,000, but he said, ‘No thanks.’”

Jack continued. “So, I decided to give it away to the universities.” He paused. Then asked me, “Do you know what happened to it?”

I’m pretty sure my eyes popped out of my head. “Do you know what you did?,” I asked him.

“I have no idea”, he replied sheepishly.

You see, to Jack, UNIX licensing was just one more thing on his to-do list to be crossed off his list. He handled it adroitly and that was that.

Soon thereafter, he was transferred to Chicago to be General Manager of Western Electric’s Hawthorne Works facility in Cicero, Illinois, the very plant where his father had worked. He had no reason to keep up with UNIX.

In the years that followed, UNIX and the open source communities it spawned, led to a massive shift in how we work, live and entertain ourselves. It’s impossible to guess what the world of software development would be like today without Jack’s decision to literally give it away to universities FOR FREE.

I’ve recounted this story to many people over the years and everyone is amazed that such an important event in computing (and maybe) world history was the result of a happy accident. But that’s the way it actually happened. A lot of life is that way. You plan and plan and then a fluke comes along and changes everything, forever.

You’ve got to wonder what the world would look like had the task to license UNIX ended up on someone else’s desk. Or if Digital Equipment’s Ken Olsen said, “yes.”

The fact is, Jack was at the exact right place and the exact right time, appointed by God to do exactly what he did.

That was your father and grandfather’s contribution to your world and mine.

Jack Bolt is the Godfather of Open Source.