[TUHS] history of community help for unix users everywhere

[TUHS] history of community help for unix users everywhere

[Will Senn]

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Hi all,

Today, as I was tooling around on stack overflow, I decided to ask a 
question on meta. For those of you who don't know, stack overflow is 
supposedly a q&a site. There are zillions of answers to quite a few "how 
to do i do x" style questions. Folks upvote and downvote the answers and 
the site is a goto for a lot of developers. I've used it  since it came 
online - back in the late 2000's. I have a love hate relationship with 
the site. When there's a good answer to a question that I have, I love 
it. When they downvote fringe cases that I care about to the point where 
they effectively become gray literature that is near on impossible to 
locate - I hate it. Meta is supposedly where you go to ask questions 
about the stack.

Yesterday, I asked this question:

    Do you know of any studies that have been done around downvoted
    content, specifically on stack overflow or stack exchange?

    By way of background - I find any questions or answers that are on
    the border (+1, 0, -1) as dubiously helpful, but when the downvotes
    pile up, much like upvotes, the answers become interesting to me
    again as they give me insights I might miss otherwise.


After a slew of why would you think that was interesting, there's no 
value with upvotes and downvotes, and your question is unclear responses 
along with, as of now, 31 downvotes net, the question was closed for 
lack of clarity. My answer, which was informed by some of the comments was:

    There don't appear to be any papers on downvoting specific to Stack
    Overflow. You can find a good list of known academic papers using
    Stack Exchange data in the list hosted on Stack Exchange Meta
    (link). It is an attempt to keep a current list of works up to date.

    The Stack Exchange Data Explorer (link) is an open API for doing
    data research, if you want to dig into the data yourself.


Which was quickly downvoted 9 times net.

To see the entire debacle:

https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/423080/are-there-any-serious-studies-on-the-value-of-downvoting

Anyhow, other than what I perceive to be a decidely hostile environment 
for asking questions, it is still actually a useful resource.

Wow, have times changed though on the hostility front.

So, it got me thinking...

What was it like in the very beginning of  things (well, ok, maybe not 
the very beginning, but around and after the advent of v6 and when it 
was at or around 50 sites) for folks needing answers to questions 
related to unix?

The questions... and for the love of Pete, don't downvote me anymore 
today, I'm a fragile snowflake, and I might just cry...

What was the mechanism - phone, email, dropbox of questions, snail mail, 
saint bernardnet, what?
What was the mood - did folks quickly tire of answering questions and 
get snippy, or was it all roses?
When did those individual inquiries get too much and what change was 
made to aggregate things?

I'm thinking there may have been overlap between unix users and 
usenet... Also, I remember using fidonet for some of my early question 
about linux, but that was 1991, many years after the rise of unix.

Thanks,

Will

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[TUHS] Re: history of community help for unix users everywhere

[segaloco via TUHS]

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At least as far as I can glean from manuals, there is the "trouble" command circa UNIX/TS 4.0 which was "a front end for the Piscataway Change Management Tracking System (CMTS)".

This was used to report issues over uucp to Piscataway where they would then be transformed into Modification Requests, examples of which in the form of the request form *and* a list of 1980-1983 changes are in Sys V literature I've scanned.

The utility would request:
- The user name
- Their location
- Phone number
- Type of request: Hardware, software, documentation, enhancement, and unknown
- System: Product in need of support (usually unix)
- Release (can be N/A)
- Severity: 1 - highest 4 - lowest
- Date
- Abstract/Summary
- Detailed Description

There is a note here too that unless stated otherwise, reports may be selected for publication in the "Mini-System Newsletter".

I've never heard of this Mini-System Newsletter. It sounds like among other things it had a digest of significant trouble reports to notify the network of known issues.

The UNIX System Error Message Manual refers to two "Support Organizations" in the Bell system:

- Field service representatives that support the hardware
- Local software support and "UNIX System Customer Service"

The manual goes on to mention the preferred group for many of the errors encounterable

I suppose this means there was usually a local guru pertinent to the type of machinery (PDP, VAX, 3B-20) and then maybe some local software folks and then the man support group.

Looks like for BTL-specific extensions, Division 452 was point of contact on that one. In the notes for the Release 5.0 manuals (troff comments) Lab

The System V modification request form lists "UNIX System Support Center" in Lisle, Illinois as the point of contact for these forms.

The 4.0 documentation roadmap mentions getting documentation resources from the Computer Information Service Library.

The 5.0 BTL-specific manual has a second trouble page listing "UNIX Computer Center Support" instead of Piscataway as the recipient of trouble reports.

In the same manual is also "wwbmail", an application that would send help requests directly to the "Writers Workbench" group. I haven't checked this manual exhaustively yet so there could be other nuggets in there.

Of course, going back in the history of UNIX, in the early days, man pages listed the application author/maintainer with the implication they should be directly contacted with questions. This changed in V3 I think, which is around the time SCCS would've been playing around with what would become CB-UNIX. I dunno when USG and the PWB groups first formally start to tinker on things, but I recall reading around 1973 being a likely backstop. I assume USG handled a lot of this traffic until the 80s and the formalization of a bunch of these other groups.

So all in all from various manuals, this is the picture I can glean from early 80s:

Support Groups:

- USG Proper
- UNIX System Customer Service
- UNIX System Support Center
- UNIX Computer Center Support
- Piscataway (USG? PWB?)
- WWB Direct Mailing List

Documentation:

- Computer Information Service Library

- Might be the same group but there is a trifold (I can't find right now) that lists the User's Manual along with the two falling blocks guides circa UNIX/TS 4.0 that could be requested from some doc group
- Various labs and divisions that maintained their own manual versions

- Mini-System Newsletter

Granted, this is all based on manuals, doesn't consider any activities of USENIX or what BSD folks were doing for their help and support. Hopefully I haven't misrepresented anything, happy to illuminate any references that may be dubious.

- Matt G.
------- Original Message -------
On Wednesday, February 8th, 2023 at 10:58 AM, Will Senn <will.senn@gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> Today, as I was tooling around on stack overflow, I decided to ask a question on meta. For those of you who don't know, stack overflow is supposedly a q&a site. There are zillions of answers to quite a few "how to do i do x" style questions. Folks upvote and downvote the answers and the site is a goto for a lot of developers. I've used it since it came online - back in the late 2000's. I have a love hate relationship with the site. When there's a good answer to a question that I have, I love it. When they downvote fringe cases that I care about to the point where they effectively become gray literature that is near on impossible to locate - I hate it. Meta is supposedly where you go to ask questions about the stack.
>
> Yesterday, I asked this question:
>
>> Do you know of any studies that have been done around downvoted content, specifically on stack overflow or stack exchange?
>>
>> By way of background - I find any questions or answers that are on the border (+1, 0, -1) as dubiously helpful, but when the downvotes pile up, much like upvotes, the answers become interesting to me again as they give me insights I might miss otherwise.
>
> After a slew of why would you think that was interesting, there's no value with upvotes and downvotes, and your question is unclear responses along with, as of now, 31 downvotes net, the question was closed for lack of clarity. My answer, which was informed by some of the comments was:
>
>> There don't appear to be any papers on downvoting specific to Stack Overflow. You can find a good list of known academic papers using Stack Exchange data in the list hosted on Stack Exchange Meta (link). It is an attempt to keep a current list of works up to date.
>>
>> The Stack Exchange Data Explorer (link) is an open API for doing data research, if you want to dig into the data yourself.
>
> Which was quickly downvoted 9 times net.
>
> To see the entire debacle:
>
> https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/423080/are-there-any-serious-studies-on-the-value-of-downvoting
>
> Anyhow, other than what I perceive to be a decidely hostile environment for asking questions, it is still actually a useful resource.
>
> Wow, have times changed though on the hostility front.
>
> So, it got me thinking...
>
> What was it like in the very beginning of things (well, ok, maybe not the very beginning, but around and after the advent of v6 and when it was at or around 50 sites) for folks needing answers to questions related to unix?
>
> The questions... and for the love of Pete, don't downvote me anymore today, I'm a fragile snowflake, and I might just cry...
>
> What was the mechanism - phone, email, dropbox of questions, snail mail, saint bernardnet, what?
> What was the mood - did folks quickly tire of answering questions and get snippy, or was it all roses?
> When did those individual inquiries get too much and what change was made to aggregate things?
>
> I'm thinking there may have been overlap between unix users and usenet... Also, I remember using fidonet for some of my early question about linux, but that was 1991, many years after the rise of unix.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Will

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[TUHS] Re: history of community help for unix users everywhere

[Will Senn]

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On 2/8/23 1:39 PM, segaloco wrote:
> At least as far as I can glean from manuals, there is the "trouble" 
> command circa UNIX/TS 4.0 which was "a front end for the Piscataway 
> Change Management Tracking System (CMTS)".
>
> This was used to report issues over uucp to Piscataway where they 
> would then be transformed into Modification Requests, examples of 
> which in the form of the request form *and* a list of 1980-1983 
> changes are in Sys V literature I've scanned.
>
> The utility would request:
> - The user name
> - Their location
> - Phone number
> - Type of request: Hardware, software, documentation, enhancement, and 
> unknown
> - System: Product in need of support (usually unix)
> - Release (can be N/A)
> - Severity: 1 - highest 4 - lowest
> - Date
> - Abstract/Summary
> - Detailed Description
>
> There is a note here too that unless stated otherwise, reports may be 
> selected for publication in the "Mini-System Newsletter".

Fascinating. Thanks for the details. I did a quick search in the source 
archive and all I could find were these:

    NetBSD-5.0.2/external/bsd/openldap/dist/doc/guide/admin/troubleshooting.sdf
    OpenBSD-4.6/gnu/usr.bin/gcc/gcc/doc/trouble.texi
    OpenBSD-4.6/usr.bin/sudo/TROUBLESHOOTING
    V10/cmd/icon/docs/trouble.roff
    pdp11v/usr/man/a_man/man8/trouble.8
    pdp11v/usr/man/u_man/man1/trouble.1

Anybody know what pdp11v is? or where the source code for the utility 
is? Did it send email, or what?

Thanks,
Will


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[TUHS] Re: history of community help for unix users everywhere

[Clem Cole]

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Will,

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.

Clem
ᐧ

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[TUHS] Re: history of community help for unix users everywhere

[Clem Cole]

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BTW: dates for this is starting in the early-mid 1970s for ArpaNet/UNIX
News/USENIX,  V7 arrives 79, and Truscott does his talk I believe winter
1980.
ᐧ

On Wed, Feb 8, 2023 at 2:57 PM Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com> wrote:

> Will,
>
> 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.
>
> Clem
> ᐧ
>

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[TUHS] Re: history of community help for unix users everywhere

[Henry Bent]

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On Wed, 8 Feb 2023 at 14:57, Will Senn <will.senn@gmail.com> wrote:

> ...
>
> pdp11v/usr/man/a_man/man8/trouble.8
> pdp11v/usr/man/u_man/man1/trouble.1
>
> Anybody know what pdp11v is? or where the source code for the utility is?
> Did it send email, or what?
>
>
I believe it is SVR1, which targeted the PDP-11.  No idea where the source
is, though note that the man page says that trouble is a frontend to what
appears to be an internal Bell Labs logging system.

-Henry

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[TUHS] Re: history of community help for unix users everywhere

[Clem Cole]

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FYI - UNIX is about 10-12 years old by the time Matt is describing - there
are thousands of sites by then.

I was describing what it was like when it 30-50 sites.

Clem
ᐧ

On Wed, Feb 8, 2023 at 2:39 PM segaloco via TUHS <tuhs@tuhs.org> wrote:

> At least as far as I can glean from manuals, there is the "trouble"
> command circa UNIX/TS 4.0 which was "a front end for the Piscataway Change
> Management Tracking System (CMTS)".
>
> This was used to report issues over uucp to Piscataway where they would
> then be transformed into Modification Requests, examples of which in the
> form of the request form *and* a list of 1980-1983 changes are in Sys V
> literature I've scanned.
>
> The utility would request:
> - The user name
> - Their location
> - Phone number
> - Type of request: Hardware, software, documentation, enhancement, and
> unknown
> - System: Product in need of support (usually unix)
> - Release (can be N/A)
> - Severity: 1 - highest 4 - lowest
> - Date
> - Abstract/Summary
> - Detailed Description
>
> There is a note here too that unless stated otherwise, reports may be
> selected for publication in the "Mini-System Newsletter".
>
> I've never heard of this Mini-System Newsletter. It sounds like among
> other things it had a digest of significant trouble reports to notify the
> network of known issues.
>
> The UNIX System Error Message Manual refers to two "Support Organizations"
> in the Bell system:
>
>    - Field service representatives that support the hardware
>    - Local software support and "UNIX System Customer Service"
>
> The manual goes on to mention the preferred group for many of the errors
> encounterable
>
> I suppose this means there was usually a local guru pertinent to the type
> of machinery (PDP, VAX, 3B-20) and then maybe some local software folks and
> then the man support group.
>
> Looks like for BTL-specific extensions, Division 452 was point of contact
> on that one. In the notes for the Release 5.0 manuals (troff comments) Lab
>
> The System V modification request form lists "UNIX System Support Center"
> in Lisle, Illinois as the point of contact for these forms.
>
> The 4.0 documentation roadmap mentions getting documentation resources
> from the Computer Information Service Library.
>
> The 5.0 BTL-specific manual has a second trouble page listing "UNIX
> Computer Center Support" instead of Piscataway as the recipient of trouble
> reports.
>
> In the same manual is also "wwbmail", an application that would send help
> requests directly to the "Writers Workbench" group. I haven't checked this
> manual exhaustively yet so there could be other nuggets in there.
>
> Of course, going back in the history of UNIX, in the early days, man pages
> listed the application author/maintainer with the implication they should
> be directly contacted with questions. This changed in V3 I think, which is
> around the time SCCS would've been playing around with what would become
> CB-UNIX. I dunno when USG and the PWB groups first formally start to tinker
> on things, but I recall reading around 1973 being a likely backstop. I
> assume USG handled a lot of this traffic until the 80s and the
> formalization of a bunch of these other groups.
>
> So all in all from various manuals, this is the picture I can glean from
> early 80s:
>
> Support Groups:
>
>    - USG Proper
>    - UNIX System Customer Service
>    - UNIX System Support Center
>    - UNIX Computer Center Support
>    - Piscataway (USG? PWB?)
>    - WWB Direct Mailing List
>
>
> Documentation:
>
>    - Computer Information Service Library
>
>
>    - Might be the same group but there is a trifold (I can't find right
>    now) that lists the User's Manual along with the two falling blocks guides
>    circa UNIX/TS 4.0 that could be requested from some doc group
>    - Various labs and divisions that maintained their own manual versions
>
>
>    - Mini-System Newsletter
>
>
> Granted, this is all based on manuals, doesn't consider any activities of
> USENIX or what BSD folks were doing for their help and support. Hopefully I
> haven't misrepresented anything, happy to illuminate any references that
> may be dubious.
>
> - Matt G.
> ------- Original Message -------
> On Wednesday, February 8th, 2023 at 10:58 AM, Will Senn <
> will.senn@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hi all,
>
> Today, as I was tooling around on stack overflow, I decided to ask a
> question on meta. For those of you who don't know, stack overflow is
> supposedly a q&a site. There are zillions of answers to quite a few "how to
> do i do x" style questions. Folks upvote and downvote the answers and the
> site is a goto for a lot of developers. I've used it since it came online -
> back in the late 2000's. I have a love hate relationship with the site.
> When there's a good answer to a question that I have, I love it. When they
> downvote fringe cases that I care about to the point where they effectively
> become gray literature that is near on impossible to locate - I hate it.
> Meta is supposedly where you go to ask questions about the stack.
>
> Yesterday, I asked this question:
>
> Do you know of any studies that have been done around downvoted content,
> specifically on stack overflow or stack exchange?
>
> By way of background - I find any questions or answers that are on the
> border (+1, 0, -1) as dubiously helpful, but when the downvotes pile up,
> much like upvotes, the answers become interesting to me again as they give
> me insights I might miss otherwise.
>
>
> After a slew of why would you think that was interesting, there's no value
> with upvotes and downvotes, and your question is unclear responses along
> with, as of now, 31 downvotes net, the question was closed for lack of
> clarity. My answer, which was informed by some of the comments was:
>
> There don't appear to be any papers on downvoting specific to Stack
> Overflow. You can find a good list of known academic papers using Stack
> Exchange data in the list hosted on Stack Exchange Meta (link). It is an
> attempt to keep a current list of works up to date.
>
> The Stack Exchange Data Explorer (link) is an open API for doing data
> research, if you want to dig into the data yourself.
>
>
> Which was quickly downvoted 9 times net.
>
> To see the entire debacle:
>
>
> https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/423080/are-there-any-serious-studies-on-the-value-of-downvoting
>
> Anyhow, other than what I perceive to be a decidely hostile environment
> for asking questions, it is still actually a useful resource.
>
> Wow, have times changed though on the hostility front.
>
> So, it got me thinking...
>
> What was it like in the very beginning of things (well, ok, maybe not the
> very beginning, but around and after the advent of v6 and when it was at or
> around 50 sites) for folks needing answers to questions related to unix?
>
> The questions... and for the love of Pete, don't downvote me anymore
> today, I'm a fragile snowflake, and I might just cry...
>
> What was the mechanism - phone, email, dropbox of questions, snail mail,
> saint bernardnet, what?
> What was the mood - did folks quickly tire of answering questions and get
> snippy, or was it all roses?
> When did those individual inquiries get too much and what change was made
> to aggregate things?
>
> I'm thinking there may have been overlap between unix users and usenet...
> Also, I remember using fidonet for some of my early question about linux,
> but that was 1991, many years after the rise of unix.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Will
>
>
>

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[TUHS] Re: history of community help for unix users everywhere

[Henry Bent]

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On Wed, 8 Feb 2023 at 14:59, Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com> wrote:

>
>  Netnews was not far behind - which sadly became net.noise when the
> signal-to-noise ratio disappeared.
>
>
 What timeframe do you consider that as having happened in?  Post-renaming,
I assume?

-Henry

> ᐧ
>

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[TUHS] Re: history of community help for unix users everywhere

[Warner Losh]

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On Wed, Feb 8, 2023 at 12:59 PM Clem Cole <clemc@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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[TUHS] Re: history of community help for unix users everywhere

[Dan Cross]

[TUHS to Bcc: and +COFF]

On Wed, Feb 8, 2023 at 3:50 PM Warner Losh <imp@bsdimp.com> wrote:
> [snip]
> 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.

Don't forget SHARE! Honestly, I think the IBM mainframe community
doesn't get its due. There was actually a lot of good stuff there.

> 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.

The phenomenon of "September" being the time when all the new
undergrads got their accounts and discovered USENET and the
shenanigans that ensued was well-known. Eternal September when AOL got
connected was a serious body blow.

As for BBSes...I'd go so far as to say that the BBS people were the
AOL people before the AOL people were the AOL people.

A takeaway from both was that communities with established norms but
no way beside social pressure to enforce them have a hard time
scaling. USENET worked when the user population was small and mostly
amenable to a set of shared goals centered around information exchange
(nevermind the Jim Flemings and other well-known cranks of the world).
But integrating someone into the fold took effort both on the
community's part as well as the user; when it wasn't obvious that
intrinsic motivation was required, or hordes of users just weren't
interested, it didn't work very well.

I think this is something we see over and over again with social networks.

        - Dan C.

[TUHS] Re: history of community help for unix users everywhere

[Heinz Lycklama]

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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@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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