One thing that made Unix really compelling back then, even without access to the system source code, was that so many different CPU types and OS variants meant that any (free) software would come as source code.
Generally for the more mainstream OS's, in my case being Solaris at work and early Linux at home, the "porting" effort to make it compile was maybe an hour or two. And that gave you a real sense of ownership, and a passing familiarity with the code, by the time it ran. And a head start on tinkering with it if it didn't quite work the way you liked.
This was much more satisfying than (at the time) binary-only shareware distributions for MS-DOS or (in my case, before the switch to Linux) Amiga OS.
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One thing that made Unix really compelling back then, even without access to the system source code, was that so many different CPU types and OS variants meant that any (free) software would come as source code.
Generally for the more mainstream OS's, in my case being Solaris at work and early Linux at home, the "porting" effort to make it compile was maybe an hour or two. And that gave you a real sense of ownership, and a passing familiarity with the code, by the time it ran. And a head start on tinkering with it if it didn't quite work the way you liked.
This was much more satisfying than (at the time) binary-only shareware distributions for MS-DOS or (in my case, before the switch to Linux) Amiga OS.