PUPS, BUPS, BURPS, and other stomach upsets

The recent fuss seems to me to be much overdone, mainly because of a small number of people with strong views and a restless urge to type. Here's my view, which I hold with some strength, but with little religious zeal. The top of Warren's web page about PUPS says the society is `devoted to the preservation of all information related to the versions of Unix that ran on Digital PDPs.' It seems pretty clear to me that his original intent was to collect and keep historic data, not to Promote The One True Unix nor to Support Software That We Approve Of nor to Make Money Fast. (No slur intended on those who do want to do those things.) Certainly that is the basis on which I joined the mailing list, and on which I've contributed the small amount of time I've put in. It makes sense to me that efforts to preserve post-PDP11 Unix systems be coordinated with PUPS, whether that means folding them into the same society or just having several groups that share. I would suggest that a single society (even if run as several distributed pieces) would probably be less work in the long run, and think that `UNIX Heritage Society' is a fine name. (Just plain `UNIX Society' is too broad; it sounds like a duplication of USENIX.) Those who think `heritage' and `preservation' are dirty words are, I think, missing the point; see the paragraph above. All of this is likely to involve more work for someone. I don't know just who has done what to make PUPS work, but it looks to me like the bulk of the work has fallen on Warren; certainly he did the single hardest part, that of getting things started. Those of us who think the society should do more things should be prepared to put our money, labour, and whatnot where our mouths are. In that spirit: I'm not likely to have much time to help out for the next few months, as I'm starting a new job, and just keeping my project to recover the old manuals into machine-readable form will soak up most of my spare cycles. (Apologies to all that the samples and whatnot I'd hoped to put up on the web still aren't up, by the way; winding down my present work commitments and trying to arrange a graceful startup of my new ones has taken a lot more effort than expected.) It may be possible in my new world to help out with some computing resources, e.g. a Canadian mirror of the PUPS archives; I'll try to plan for that in the already-being-planned upheaval of my new world's computing environment. If the master PUPS site is short of resources, e.g. could use another disk or two, I'd be happy to help out with some cash. I encourage others who can help out to speak up. Judging by the amount of mail that has passed through the mailing list recently (almost 5% of an RK05 by my count), there should be some spare energy out there somewhere. It may also be worth while to approach USENIX for support; preserving UNIX heritage is certainly not foreign to them, and their current president has some history of preservation work. Norman Wilson Received: (from major@localhost) by minnie.cs.adfa.oz.au (8.8.8/8.8.8) id FAA19772 for pups-liszt; Wed, 5 Aug 1998 05:24:28 +1000 (EST) Received: from skatter.USask.Ca (skatter.usask.ca [128.233.14.1]) by minnie.cs.adfa.oz.au (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id FAA19762 for <pups(a)minnie.cs.adfa.oz.au>au>; Wed, 5 Aug 1998 05:24:19 +1000 (EST) Received: from hydrus.USask.Ca (hydrus.usask.ca [128.233.14.27]) by skatter.USask.Ca (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id NAA09338; Tue, 4 Aug 1998 13:24:13 -0600 (CST) From: Neil Johnson <neil(a)skatter.usask.ca> Received: (from neil@localhost) by hydrus.USask.Ca (8.7.2/8.7.2) id NAA16324; Tue, 4 Aug 1998 13:24:11 -0600 (CST) Date: Tue, 4 Aug 1998 13:24:11 -0600 (CST) Message-Id: <199808041924.NAA16324(a)hydrus.USask.Ca> To: msokolov(a)blackwidow.SOML.CWRU.Edu, pups(a)minnie.cs.adfa.oz.au Subject: Re: The Unix Society Sender: owner-pups(a)minnie.cs.adfa.oz.au Precedence: bulk I don't like the idea of focusing the group on versions of unix with source licences available for a number of reasons. Expensive source licences are available for new versions of unix. If the limitation is to an inexpensive hobbiest licence then a somewhat arbitrary price has to be set for inexpensive. A second, and more important objection is that we are explicitly excluding users who want to use the free PDP-11 unix binary licences. Finally, users of other vintage unixes with legal, binary only licences would be excluded. Neil Received: (from major@localhost) by minnie.cs.adfa.oz.au (8.8.8/8.8.8) id FAA19830 for pups-liszt; Wed, 5 Aug 1998 05:48:32 +1000 (EST)