List members under this subject line have contributed reminders of older efforts in the sharing of software, predating Linux, the Free Software Foundation, the GNU Project, and the BSD Unix family. Starting at the string "begin historical remarks" in the preamble comments of http://www.math.utah.edu/pub/tex/bib/gnu.bib http://www.math.utah.edu/pub/tex/bib/gnu.html I record things that I've encountered over decades in computing, going back to Charles Babbage in 1830 and Joseph Henry in 1849, jumping to IBM SHARE in 1955, and onward. As usual in our bibliography archives, *.html files look similar on screen to *.bib files, but have live hyperlinks. Comments, corrections, improvements, etc. on that history are welcome. Babbage's own works are covered at http://www.math.utah.edu/pub/bibnet/authors/b/babbage-charles.bib http://www.math.utah.edu/pub/bibnet/authors/b/babbage-charles.html and those of his collaborator at http://www.math.utah.edu/pub/bibnet/authors/l/lovelace-ada-augusta.bib http://www.math.utah.edu/pub/bibnet/authors/l/lovelace-ada-augusta.html ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - Nelson H. F. Beebe Tel: +1 801 581 5254 - - University of Utah FAX: +1 801 581 4148 - - Department of Mathematics, 110 LCB Internet e-mail: beebe(a)math.utah.edu - - 155 S 1400 E RM 233 beebe(a)acm.org beebe(a)computer.org - - Salt Lake City, UT 84112-0090, USA URL: http://www.math.utah.edu/~beebe/ - -------------------------------------------------------------------------------