We also had open source before we had GPL, that is how UNIX got widespread anyway, in source tapes.

Amiga had the Fish disks, PC had all the whateverware variants during its MS-DOS days.

8 bits naturally had the magazine listings to type in.

er, no, it was licensed, but available to educational institutions. I remember having to send Bell Labs our university calendar when i wanted to get a copy of LSI-11 Unix circa 1976. What is true is that Ken Thompson visited a number of places over the years, and maybe from time to time he forgot to pick up his Unix install tapes when he left.

Bell Labs/AT&T claimed exclusive ownership of Unix, and the exclusive right to license it, right up to the BSD case in the early 1990s, where it was determined that AT&T had used Berkeley code, and vice versa, to the point where copyright notices were essentially fiction. Berkeley Software Design had to remove a small number of files from their distribution, and then System V and BSD could go their own separate ways.