"A lawsuit between Unix copyright holder AT&T and University of California at Berkeley was also partly to blame." As I recall this was a big hangup to adoption

"A lawsuit between Unix copyright holder AT&T and University of California at Berkeley was also partly to blame." As I recall this was a big hangup to adoption and/or commercial release. All the hardware vendors were using AT&T licenses and there were $500 licenses for PCs so the market for FreeBSD wasn't so compelling as that for Linux became.