On Thu, Mar 15, 2018 at 11:29 AM, Dan Cross <crossd@gmail.com> wrote:

One of the things that's always fascinated me about Unix is the community aspect; in particular, I imagine that in the early days when machines were multiplexed among many simultaneous users, I wonder whether there was a greater sense of knowing what others were up to, working on, or generally doing.

I think of the /etc/motd file as being a part of this. It is, in some very real sense, a way to announce things to the entire user community.

So what are its origins? Where did it first appear? I haven't dug into this, but I imagine it was at Berkeley. What was it used for early on at individual sites?

I'm pretty sure it predates the #1 editions, if check the sources for the login program on TUHS you can be sure. Steve Johnson and others have pointed out that systems people (such as Dennis) were often night owls and often added/changed things in the UNIX group or their own systems. This was no different than the way other systems (such as timesharing system like TOPS or TSS worked). System time in the day was expensive and if you wanted to make a change the affected a lot of people, you did it 'off hours.'

Remember, most people in those days were 'dialing in' or going to a terminal room. So you got a fresh log in session once or twice a day. So, I believe that the idea of motd was to have a standard place where everyone could get messages that might affect them and be pretty sure you saw it before you started your work.

For instance, two messages I can think of I put the EE/Mellon systems years ago were on the order of: 'New Pascal compiler installed, should fix the core dump issue Tron was having - send me email if you are still having issues. Clem' Or 'Klone and I just updated our RK07 disk driver to add bad disk block support -- we think its working as far as we have been able to test. If you notice something strange, please check the console log before you call either us.. Clem'

You get the idea,

Clem