[jpsb]

"3.1. Bell labs withdraws (4/1969)

"Over time, hope was replaced by frustration as the group effort initially failed to produce an economically useful system. Bell Labs withdrew from the effort in 1969 but a small band of users at Bell Labs Computing Science Research Center in Murray Hill -- Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Doug McIlroy, and J. F. Ossanna -- continued to seek the Holy Grail." -- Lucent web page

"... the problem was the increasing obviousness of the failure of Multics to deliver promptly any sort of usable system, let alone the panacea envisioned earlier." -- Dennis Ritchie, "The Evolution of the Unix Time-sharing System"

[Paladin2]

The Vision apparently came from MIT (communists all), but as they were likely doing it for academic interest and student training and academic jobs and were under no particular time pressure. Except that likely the gov't was at least partly funding the whole effort.

I'd suggest that anyone who was even partly trained at MIT from that time on is tainted with the "theft" of IP that they carried away from the rest of the communists there.