[hollerith]

Early Unix is not the product of hobbyist culture, but rather of an elite institution (Bell Labs) that only hired from the top science and engineering schools. The other institution involved in the early development of Unix was the CS Department of UC Berkeley, whose work was funded by DARPA, which is approximately the complete opposite of hobbyist culture.

When DARPA started funding the addition (by Berkeley CS Dept) of a TCP/IP stack to Unix in 1980, hobbyist culture was about 2 years into the start of its experimentation with the BBS. Specifically, according to Google Gemini, "The very first [BBS] for personal computers, named CBBS (Computerized Bulletin Board System), officially went online on February 16, 1978".

It is interesting to notice how the Unix design filtered down to hobbyists. Bell Labs started sharing Unix (at first, only with other elite institutions) and one reason the decision makers at the corporation (AT&T) that owned Bell Labs was willing to sign off on the sharing was that they had little hope of ever making any significant money from Unix because AT&T had entered into an agreement with the government that it would not enter the computer market. (At the same time, IBM agreed that it would not enter the telecommunications market. The thinking of the government was that each megacorporation was a monopolist or near-monopolist in its market, which would give it an unfair advantage in entering related markets.) Because of this sharing, it was on Richard Stallman's radar in 1983 when he chose to model his GNU system on Unix. Note that at the time Stallman was also an employee of an elite institution (MIT's AI Lab).

Richard Stallman free-software movement was the main force driving the Unix design into the hands of the hobbyists, but it took almost a decade for it to do that. When David Cutler arrived at Microsoft in October 1988 to start the NT project, Unix was still mainly associated with elite institutions.