Now stop picking on Joerg already. Not every university was invested in Unix. In practice Unix source was pretty much unobtainable if you happened to live outside of the "Unix bubble".

I grew up and went to school/university in Switzerland, and getting access to UNIX source was nothing but a crazy pipe dream at the time. I don't even know if my university had a source license (I can't imagine they didn't), but in any case it wasn't something that they would let you use as a normal student. None of my inquiries at the time resulted in anything that would allow me to get access to Unix source. If the university had it, this wasn't public information, and they didn't share. I couldn't prove that my university had a license, and I had no way to get the actual bits. This was the 90ies btw.

We had Sun workstations (Solaris, without source), Windows (blech, but funnily enough there were source kits. No, you couldn't get access to that either), and of course the locally developed Oberon machines (Lilith) and later Bluebottle. I also saw some VAXen running VMS (on their way out). Some departments had RS/6000s, Alphas and SGIs and other random stuff (do I need to mention that they came without source?). I've never seen any trace of Unix source or even BSD.

We all longed for some Unix that was available for personal use, and Linux absolutely filled that gap. While 386BSD was theoretically available, it came out almost a year after Linus announced his first version of Linux. 386BSD seemed to have a lot of strings attached, and it wasn't really usable until FreeBSD/NetBSD. By that time, Linux had gained a lot of momentum already.

Rico