Is there a good book on Unix history? Something accessible like "Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins Of The Internet"?
You also have resources like The Unix Heritage Society [2], who show a timeline of historic events on their wiki [3].
I bought Brian Kernighan's memoir [4], which so far is an incredibly detailed and personal account of his time at BTL.
[1] http://catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/html/
[3] https://wiki.tuhs.org/doku.php?id=events:start
[4] https://www.amazon.com/UNIX-History-Memoir-Brian-Kernighan/d...
On page 161 the author mentions in passing that Eric Schmidt had been working on BerkNet. THE Eric Schmidt. The Google Eric Schmidt.
Earlier the book mentions that Bill Joy was able to hire a developer with money they got from DARPA. That developer was Michael Toy and later Sam Leffler. There's a movie called Code Rush about the open-sourcing of Netscape's source code in 1998 (which begat Mozilla and Firefox) and Michael Toy was the project lead for the open source effort back then. Sam Leffler later developed TIFF.
The Unix-Haters Handbook (1994) has a lot of history and takes you back in time..
http://gen.lib.rus.ec/search.php?req=unix+haters+handbook
Brian Kernighan 'interviews' Ken Thompson (2019) - Ken telling stories. They're both very funny, a very entertaining video, some stories I (and even Brian) hadn't heard.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EY6q5dv_B-o
UNIX: Making Computers Easier To Use (1982)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XvDZLjaCJuw
Also the other day I read in the AWK book that it was mainly inspired by SNOBOL4, so looked at some SNOBOL4 books from archive.org, from 1970-2 and just before, slightly earlier than Unix history takes you back. One tells you how to organize your punch cards to feed in the program.. Another had a bibliography with many dozens of SNOBOL books. It was widely used by people in the humanities apparently; like AWK it was at home dealing with words and text.