Many nice, upper-middle-class Berkeley backyards boast a redwood patio, possibly a hot tub, perhaps a vegetable garden complete with thriving rosemary bushes and marauding raccoons. Bob Fabry's backyard has a radio tower that wouldn't look out of place at a major Air Force base. Capable of telescoping upward to a height of 100 feet, and built mostly by Fabry himself -- the hub that rotates the antenna was scavenged from a 1940s airplane propeller -- the radio tower looms beside Fabry's home like a not-so-miniature Eiffel Tower. One look at it and you realize you are in the presence of a very dedicated geek.

Fabry takes his ham radio "hobby" seriously. He once even helped organize a trip to the uninhabited wilderness of Heard Island, about 1,000 miles north of Antarctica, just to set up a ham radio station for a few days so amateur-radio enthusiasts all over the world could enjoy the pleasure of exchanging radio signals with the faraway station.

But Fabry's most impressive achievement scales far beyond his tower or his expeditions. He is the Berkeley computer science professor who orchestrated the creation of Berkeley Unix. Not that he wrote a lot of code -- that honor belonged primarily to Joy and the other members of Fabry's Computer Science Research Group, an all-star band of programmers whose roster included names like Sam Leffler, Kirk McKusick, Mike Karels and Keith Bostic. But while Joy and others were hacking for 36 hours at a stretch, improving file systems,* networking performance, memory utilization and a hundred other arcane but crucial elements of Unix, Fabry was running interference -- maneuvering through the formidable bureaucracies of the University of California and AT&T, dealing with departmental politics and backbiting and, most important, writing the grant proposals that brought a steady flood of DARPA money into Berkeley.

Fabry was personally responsible for bringing Unix to Berkeley. His reasons were simple, and offer an early example of the pragmatist bent that has characterized BSD development ever since.

Unix was cheap. AT&T had been forced to practically give it away for free by government order. But Unix was also, fundamentally, a hack designed to work on cheap hardware. Back in 1969, Thompson wanted to get a computer game called Space Travel working on a castoff PDP-7. So what did he do? He wrote an entire operating system that made it possible. Kind of like using a nuclear missile to hammer a nail -- but then that's often standard operating procedure for obsessed hackers.

Fabry was entranced by Unix's affordability, along with the ease with which it could be adapted to different computer hardware. In addition to his academic research focus on operating systems, he was involved in setting up computing resources for the UC-Berkeley student body. In the mid-'70s, this could be an expensive proposition. Typically, operating systems that would allow multiple users of a mainframe* to work at individual terminals were designed only for extremely expensive computers. The costs per user could easily reach $50,000 a terminal, which made such systems impractical for pedagogic purposes. But Unix, used in combination with a relatively inexpensive PDP-11 from DEC, ended up costing closer to $5,000 "per seat."

Even better, a $99 license fee bought you access to the Unix source code -- to the blueprints, the magic recipe, the key that unlocked all hidden mysteries. For researchers, teachers and students, this was priceless. Researchers working on cutting-edge operating system technology could experiment with already existing source code and modify it for their needs; students who wanted to learn how an operating system really worked could find out by getting their hands dirty with the code. Duane Adams, the DARPA contract "monitor" who administered the Berkeley Unix contracts, notes that the availability of source code was an explicit reason why DARPA chose Berkeley Unix instead of contending aspirants like DEC's* VMS.* Never mind that VMS had been designed from the bottom up for the DEC VAX computers that were the most popular hardware for Arpanet nodes; VMS was a closed, proprietary system. You couldn't get in and muck about, so it just wasn't attractive to researchers.

DARPA was also recognizing reality. Prominent researchers, hungering for the magnetic tapes carrying Berkeley's latest distributions like so many desperate junkies, demanded that DARPA adopt Berkeley Unix because that's what they were already using.

"What was driving DARPA," says Fabry, "was that almost all of their contractors were telling them that they were running Berkeley Unix and it was superior to anything else available."

As one popular explanation has it, Unix's source code became widely available through a lucky accident -- as an unanticipated consequence of the consent decree that forbade AT&T from commercializing its non-telephony-related inventions. But that's only a part of the story. Unix was always more than just a bit player in a showdown between the world's largest government and the world's biggest corporation. Unix was, at least in the mind's eye of scientists like Fabry, "a thing of beauty." And from the very beginning, Unix benefited from a communal vibe that spread directly from its creators, Ritchie and Thompson.

Fabry recalls grasping the hidden wonders of Unix one week in 1975 when Thompson conducted a "reading" of Unix over several successive nights.

"The first meeting of the West Coast Unix User's Group had about 12 or 15 people," recalls Fabry, a mild man, now 60 years old, who clearly delights in his 25-year-old memories. "We all sat around in Cory Hall and Ken Thompson read code with us. We went through the kernel* line by line in a series of evening meetings; he just explained what everything did ... It was wonderful."

The reading of the code: Thompson's primeval act of deconstruction was an initiation into the Unix cabala, a ritual passing down of code lore. Fabry may have brought the first physical manifestation of Unix to Berkeley, but Thompson's reading embedded it in Berkeley's soul. Eric Allman, *" who was later to write sendmail,* the open-source-software mail transport program that still shuttles the vast majority of Internet mail across the Net, was an undergraduate at Berkeley when he attended the readings. He still has his marked-up "listings," reams of cheap, flimsy computer paper with notes scribbled on them, detailing the obscurities of the C programming language and other Unix arcana.

"The really bizarre thing is that Ken Thompson did a free tutorial on Unix kernel internals," recalls Allman, "and everyone fit into a rather tiny room." Today, you'd need to rent a ballroom.

Fabry marched against the Vietnam War while he was a graduate student in Chicago, and notes proudly that in his entire 12-year tenure at Berkeley he never once wore a tie. But although some historians have later described the Berkeley hackers as freedom fighters -- especially in the context of their battle with AT&T (which came well after Fabry had retired) -- neither Fabry nor the hackers themselves saw what they were doing in such explicit ideological terms. But when I ask Fabry if there was ever a moment when the goal crystallized in his head that software should be free, he turns the question around:

"Where did it come from that code should cost money? I think that's the fair question," says Fabry. In the mid-'70s, most programmers had grown up in an era where software was usually included with hardware and not considered a separate revenue source or proprietary intellectual property. Joy saw his work on Unix as research, to be shared with the rest of the academic research community the same way professors had been sharing the fruits of their labors for thousands of years. Ritchie and Thompson wanted their software to be used -- they did everything in their power to help the Berkeley programmers fix bugs and make improvements.

None of them saw himself as a crusader. But a trickle of idealism still occasionally leaked out.

"I think the spirit in which we were putting this all together was much the spirit that was picked up later by the Free Software Foundation and the various people who were trying to build 'software for the people,'" says Fabry. "The idea is that there is no duplication cost for software, so it ought to be basically free, and we were all working together to try to produce this ideal system that we would all love to have, and love to be able to use ourselves. That was the goal of a lot of people, and of course that was the original goal of Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie in starting Unix."

Fabry retired at age 43, tired of the DARPA treadmill and eager to focus his energy on his ham-radio tinkering. But Berkeley Unix's record of success still thrills him.

"Berkeley Unix was clearly the most successful university software project that has ever gone on," says Fabry in a rare moment of assertiveness, before backtracking slightly. "I don't know, I haven't been keeping up since 1983 and maybe there's been something since then, but I believe that that was true at the time. We had literally thousands and thousands of installations, and a whole generation of computer science students all around the world grew up on Berkeley Unix. It set a standard for operating systems that people are still having trouble doing better than. It was also the first efficient networking solution; for years it was the only game in town, the basis of Internet development. It really was one of the things that the people who made the Internet what it is today built on. There were battles that had been solved that didn't have to be solved again in order to do whatever new part that they wanted to do."

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