CB/UNIX was one of several versions in various divisions of Bell Labs to implement IPC facilities beyond pipes and signals. Top management in a division would declare that they wanted to use Unix, but needed some particular IPC mechanism: semaphores, events, message passing, etc.-- and needed it right away. I always believed that these demands stiffer as they percolated up through channels to the point that no alternative mechanism would do. We in research would have preferred to seek a general solution that would suffice to serve the various demands. Besides, anything that we produced but didn't use ourselves would automatically be suspect. We were very wary of featuritis. Roughly speaking, each demand led to a different local flavor of Unix, each (I like to think) reflecting the particular variant of IPC with which one of its system designers worked in graduate school. Somewhere between the wariness of research Unix, where an ethos of generality ruled, and Linux, which offers a dozen ways to do anything, there must lie a happy medium--a medium that I believe would be much closer to Unix than Linux. That, alas, has not proved to be the way of open source.