>
> I've been wondering something similar, about another piece of computer history. The basics of the Unix operating
> system were developed by researchers working for AT&T in 1970. The university of Berkeley immediately started
> working on their own version of Unix, which became BSD (which now underlies the Mac OS X). AT&T immediately sued
> Berkeley for copyright infringement. Berkeley won the suit. Apparently AT&T research had accepted government money
> at some point, or used government funded, university based research (from MIT) to get started.
>
> 2 questions:
>
> 1.) Anyone know where a history of this might be?
>
> 2.) It seems like once upon a time any research that received public funds had to remain in the public domain. That
> no longer seems to be the case, companies seem to commonly patent research that is based on government funded
> research. When did things change, or has it always been the way it is now?
>
i do not know about patenting publicly funded research but some history:
netscape, yahoo, to name just two "internet" companies, are based on products that grew out of work done at universities (netscape at NCSA at UIUC and yahoo at stanford, if i remember right).
regarding unix:
it was developed in the 60s as an outgrowth of the failed multics project (which was worked on at MIT) and i think some of the first stable releases were out by 71 (albeit missing sockets, virtual memory, etc). the unix system was provided to various schools by att itself and it entered uc berkeley through ken thompson, one of its creators, when he was teaching there.i also remember tom london, whom i used to work for at the labs, mentioning porting the code to dec's vax while visiting berkeley. uc berkeley developed (as noted above) this into bsd (BSD unix itself existed and exists both as commercial and free software today, see freebsd, netbsd, etc), adding many of the features such as virtual memory and networking including the IP protocols (and what eventually led to today's internet. if i remember right, bill joy, who would later go on, with folks at stanford, to launch sun microsystems, did some work on virtual memory, etc).
for a good history of unix, see:
http://www.bell-labs.com/history/unix/
as for macos X, you may be right, but my memory is that its based on the Mach (micro)kernel from CMU, but then again, that might be splitting hairs, unless you are a computer systems person.
--ravi