You're probably right, but you can't imagine the thrill of using the very early Unix system releases (I was an undergrad when the first Bell-external releases w

You're probably right, but you can't imagine the thrill of using the very early Unix system releases (I was an undergrad when the first Bell-external releases were shipped to my office-mate Geoff Steckel at Harvard): imagine an OS written in a higher-level (non-assembly) language! (Well, Multics existed, of course, but that was wildly byzantine in its complexity, being based on PL/I, which itself was a huge language. ;-) And imagine a fairly powerful OS which was so simple at heart that you could read the entire source and understand it. (Lyon's samizdat book helped, too.) For those of us studying systems at the time, it was magical.