[TUHS] history of community help for unix users everywhere

[Heinz Lycklama]

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 at 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
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