[TUHS] UNIX NEWS and ; login: archives, particularly from 1975-1978

John Gilmore gnu at toad.com
Fri Nov 20 08:54:05 AEST 2020


While cleaning up a few shelves of old USENIX proceedings, I found a
mysterious manila envelope full of xeroxed copies of all the original
UNIX NEWS newsletters from 1975 thru 1977.  It was renamed to ;login:
in 1977 and has continued publication to this day.  The envelope also
contained ;login: issues v2n6 thru v3n8 (1977-1978).

I scanned those all in today and put them up on my website, here:

  http://www.toad.com/early-usenix-newsletters/

These have not been OCR'd, and many of the pages were rotated by 90
degrees in the original publication, to fit two pages of typewritten
correspondence (or recipient address lists) into one page of newsletter.
Still, in a quick web search I was unable to find copies of these
anywhere else, so I invested a few hours to scan them in and post them
for historical interest.  As an example, Sixth Edition (v6) UNIX was
announced in issue number 1.

These are all free to publish nowadays.  USENIX was one of the first
technical organizations to establish an Open Access policy for its
publications, a step which distinguishes them from ACM and many academic
publishers who favor revenue for themselves over the progress of
science.  (I voted for this policy decades ago when I was a USENIX board
member.)  This page, for example, says:

  https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity20/presentation/schwarz

  "USENIX is committed to Open Access to the research presented at our
  events. Papers and proceedings are freely available to everyone once
  the event begins. Any video, audio, and/or slides that are posted
  after the event are also free and open to everyone."

The ;login: archives at USENIX.org are complete from October 1997 to today:

  https://www.usenix.org/publications/login  

Also, most but not all issues of ;login: from 1983 to 1997 have been
scanned by USENIX and uploaded to the Internet Archive here:

  https://archive.org/details/usenix-login?&sort=date

The USENIX Association apparently has paper copies of the stuff I
scanned in today, but they are still trying to locate ;login: issues
from 1979 and parts of 1980 and 1981.  In addition, they are backlogged
on scanning in their old materials (including copies of ;login: between
1978/09 and 1983/02).  If you have old copies of ;login: that you don't
see visible in these places, please scan them, or offer them to USENIX.

Also, if you have old proceedings of USENIX conferences, there are still
three that the USENIX staff do not have any copy of:

  XFree86 Technical Conference
  https://www.usenix.org/legacy/publications/library/proceedings/xfree86/
  2001-11-08

  5th Annual Linux Showcase & Conference
  https://www.usenix.org/legacy/publications/library/proceedings/als01/tech.html
  2001-11-08

  WORLDS '04
  https://www.usenix.org/legacy/events/worlds04/tech/
  2004-12-05

If you have any of these three, please let <info at usenix.org> know.  They
also lack about twenty more for which they have posted the academic
papers, but don't have the covers or front-matter, so if you have other
proceedings from between 1989 and 2004 that you'd be willing to part
with or scan, also let them know.  Thanks!

	John
	


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