I'm not sure the creators of Unix would have agreed. Unix was a step in a very different direction at the time. It was a reaction to baroque operating systems t

I'm not sure the creators of Unix would have agreed. Unix was a step in a very different direction at the time. It was a reaction to baroque operating systems that did a lot of stuff and were quite complex. The key to Unix is simplicity and, if you shave it down, that it was really a system interface definition - which enabled other people to create Unixen by offering the same system call interface with the same semantics. It was neither free, nor do I think the timing played much of a role since there wasn't any comparable OS being made at the time. The important bit of Unix was a set of key ideas.