Because the company widely and inexpensively licensed Unix, by the early 1980s thousands of people used Unix at AT&T and elsewhere, and as computer science students moved from universities into companies they wanted to continue to use it. Observers began to see Unix as a potential universal operating system, suitable for all computers. Less than 20,000 lines of code almost all in C composed the Unix kernel as of 1983, and more than 75% was not machine-dependent. By that year Unix or a Unix-like system was available for at least 16 different processors and architectures from about 60 vendors; "BYTE" noted that computer companies "may support other systems, but a Unix implementation always happens to be available", and that DEC and IBM supported Unix as an alternative to their proprietary operating systems.