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

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