On 6/26/24 4:57 PM, Warren Toomey via TUHS wrote:

Good question. There isn't a real succession plan. We do have a handful of people behind the scenes (the TUHS team) who have access to the server and who could take over the care and feeding if required. The regular operations are mostly documented but, as always, could be improved upon.

The "assets" are nearly all publicly available. The Unix archive can be easily copied: see the end of https://wiki.tuhs.org/doku.php?id=source:unix_archive

The mailing list contents can be downloaded from here as Zip files: https://www.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/

The actual list of people on the list isn't available, although the TUHS team could easily get a copy.

The "tuhs.org" domain I have registered until May 2030.

What I should probably do is to ask one of the TUHS team to volunteer to a) put their credit card up as a secondary for my cloud provider in case my card stops working and b) give them access to the cloud provider so they can make their card the primary one.

I did try to float the idea of a more formalised TUHS structure a while back but there was not much enthusiasm at the time :-)

Cheers, Warren

P.S. And I should set up a "dead man's hand" script to tell the list if I have been 'inactive' for a few weeks.

Hi Warren,

I didn't realize it was so easily mirrored. The instructions are super clear and effective. This all sounds like a good approach to providing for continuity over the long haul, even if it's not super formal.

It's interesting the perspectives gathering here - for some, it's like a chat room to reminisce. For others, it's an information source. For a few, it's a living history. What may not be apparent to some of the folks who lived the history is that it is a fragile thread and those who experienced its genesis firsthand are a rapidly shrinking population. If we've seen misinformation creeping into discussions of late, it's only going to get much worse over the years. Particularly if we don't capture more of the real story and keep that alive. TUHS is a great resource for folks to turn to when they want to dig deeper into the origins of UNIX or to learn more about the motivations for early decisions that charted the course of it's descendants. The transition from research unix to commercial and open source is becoming history that fewer and fewer folks really know much about. All this to say, TUHS is more than a chat platform for reminiscing and clarifications of the record - it's a historical record of important conversations that should be preserved and protected :).

Thanks,

Will

Thanks for the details!

Will