John,
Does Usenix have online proceedings of the technical conferences from
the 1980s? I can't find them.
Thanks,
Mary Ann
On 11/19/20 2:54 PM, John Gilmore wrote:
> While cleaning up a few shelves of old USENIX proceedings, I found a
> mysterious manila envelope full of xeroxed copies of all the original
> UNIX NEWS newsletters from 1975 thru 1977. It was renamed to ;login:
> in 1977 and has continued publication to this day. The envelope also
> contained ;login: issues v2n6 thru v3n8 (1977-1978).
>
> I scanned those all in today and put them up on my website, here:
>
> http://www.toad.com/early-usenix-newsletters/
>
> These have not been OCR'd, and many of the pages were rotated by 90
> degrees in the original publication, to fit two pages of typewritten
> correspondence (or recipient address lists) into one page of newsletter.
> Still, in a quick web search I was unable to find copies of these
> anywhere else, so I invested a few hours to scan them in and post them
> for historical interest. As an example, Sixth Edition (v6) UNIX was
> announced in issue number 1.
>
> These are all free to publish nowadays. USENIX was one of the first
> technical organizations to establish an Open Access policy for its
> publications, a step which distinguishes them from ACM and many academic
> publishers who favor revenue for themselves over the progress of
> science. (I voted for this policy decades ago when I was a USENIX board
> member.) This page, for example, says:
>
> https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity20/presentation/schwarz
>
> "USENIX is committed to Open Access to the research presented at our
> events. Papers and proceedings are freely available to everyone once
> the event begins. Any video, audio, and/or slides that are posted
> after the event are also free and open to everyone."
>
> The ;login: archives at USENIX.org are complete from October 1997 to today:
>
> https://www.usenix.org/publications/login
>
> Also, most but not all issues of ;login: from 1983 to 1997 have been
> scanned by USENIX and uploaded to the Internet Archive here:
>
> https://archive.org/details/usenix-login?&sort=date
>
> The USENIX Association apparently has paper copies of the stuff I
> scanned in today, but they are still trying to locate ;login: issues
> from 1979 and parts of 1980 and 1981. In addition, they are backlogged
> on scanning in their old materials (including copies of ;login: between
> 1978/09 and 1983/02). If you have old copies of ;login: that you don't
> see visible in these places, please scan them, or offer them to USENIX.
>
> Also, if you have old proceedings of USENIX conferences, there are still
> three that the USENIX staff do not have any copy of:
>
> XFree86 Technical Conference
> https://www.usenix.org/legacy/publications/library/proceedings/xfree86/
> 2001-11-08
>
> 5th Annual Linux Showcase & Conference
> https://www.usenix.org/legacy/publications/library/proceedings/als01/tech.html
> 2001-11-08
>
> WORLDS '04
> https://www.usenix.org/legacy/events/worlds04/tech/
> 2004-12-05
>
> If you have any of these three, please let <info@usenix.org> know. They
> also lack about twenty more for which they have posted the academic
> papers, but don't have the covers or front-matter, so if you have other
> proceedings from between 1989 and 2004 that you'd be willing to part
> with or scan, also let them know. Thanks!
>
> John
>