8 Feb
2023
8 Feb
'23
10:34 p.m.
The "open source" term may have been coined in 1998, but the term
"open systems" was in use well before in the mid to late 1980's when
we started the /usr/group and POSIX standards efforts. That was one
of the reasons why I named my high tech consultancy service with the
name "Open Systems Technology Associates" (OSTA) in 1992.
Heinz
On 2/8/2023 12:48 PM, Warner Losh wrote:
On Wed, Feb 8, 2023 at 12:59 PM Clem Cole <clemc(a)ccc.com> wrote:
For those of us outside of BTL, i.e. the Academic users, "Unix
News" was created - which became ';login" - We started to meet
informally at a few universities and talk to each other. Those
of us on the ArpaNet that email/FTP and the like, started to share
patches - but mostly things were shared when we got together via
magtape. When they were held in NYC, we might be lucky and someone
from Research might come (and even accidentally spill a few bits
on the floor that mix fix something). Eventually, USENIX was
formed, and we met twice a year formally. That was so popular,
USENIX started having specialty conferences such as the one for C
and C++, LISA, Networking, Linux and Free Software, etc.
Similarly, with V7, UUCP was given to use a USENET was started by
Tom Truscott and his famous "auto-dialler" that he hacked with a
12v relay, a DR-11C and described at the Bolder USENIX
conference. Netnews was not far behind - which sadly became
net.noise when the signal-to-noise ratio disappeared.
Yea, reading both the early usenix news letters and the early AUUG
newsletters carefully shows more community action as well. I'm not
sure what netnews was like in the 74-79 time frame before UUCP was
wisely available, so I can't comment on that, but there's reports from
names you'd recognize, and reports about USENIX conferences, reports
about local gatherings... and then all kinds of crazy stuff: letters
on university letter head that had bug fixes in it for this or that
problem... Addresses where you write and send photocopies of AT&T and
DEC licenses and get FORTRAN or MARCO-11 or other such things where
people had used their DEC source license to hack in unix I/O routines
into the FORTRAN compiler. And there were all kinds of 'user shared'
programs that ranged from 'trivial problem, poorly executed' to
'really cool DEC OS emulators' depending on the era.. The bas.s that
is in V6 and V7 (V5 too?) is an early version fo DEC's BASIC that was
hacked for unix and some I/O devices that were specific to the labs...
there were also advice for what versions of unix to use, and what
versions were available to license. References to things that you
can't google for anymore (or if you do all you find is the google
index of the login issues / auus issues). There's also a number of
country SIGs under DECUS that were for unix in the 77 or so time frame
that might be good to search newsletters for... bitsavers has a bunch,
but not sure they are early enough (I didn't come across the
references to them until long after I looked at what bitsavers had).
The community aspect of open source was there in spades as well, with
people helping other people and sharing fixes. But it was complicated
by restrictive license agreements and somewhat (imho) overzealous
protection of 'rights' at times that hampered things and would have
echos in later open source licenses and attitudes that would develop
in response. Even though the term 'open source' wasn't coined until
1998, the open source ethos were present in many of the early computer
users groups, not least the unix ones. USENET amplified it, plus let
in the unwashed masses who also had useful contributions (in addition
to a lot of noise)... then things got really crowded with noise when
AOL went live... And I'm sure there's a number of other BBS and/or
compuserve communities I'm giving short-shrift here because I wasn't
part of them in real time.
Warner