[mannykannot]

AT&T was forced by the government to invest massively in Unix? That does not fit with what I have heard about its origins, which was as a shoestring project of Ken Thompson, Dennis Richie, and a few other collaborators [1]. If anything, the government prevented AT&T from following up on the initial development, as part of its anti-trust measures that allowed AT&T a telephone monopoly while preventing it from expanding into computing and related technologies.

The article you link to may describe the current state of affairs, but it does not properly characterize the state of affairs in the 1950s and beyond, when many major technology corporations had research laboratories. While their activities were nominally directed towards future products and profitability, in practice this was interpreted quite freely, leading to things like Unix, as well as scientific work.

[1]http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/taoup/html/ch02s01.html