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