The Unix Heritage Society mailing list
 help / color / mirror / Atom feed
From: crossd@gmail.com (Dan Cross)
Subject: [TUHS] Origin of the MOTD file?
Date: Thu, 15 Mar 2018 11:29:11 -0400	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <CAEoi9W49jx_hrNd11meGGJi00cZ+FDs9BtB_W7b2c=drujzNSA@mail.gmail.com> (raw)

One of the things that's always fascinated me about Unix is the community
aspect; in particular, I imagine that in the early days when machines were
multiplexed among many simultaneous users, I wonder whether there was a
greater sense of knowing what others were up to, working on, or generally
doing.

I think of the /etc/motd file as being a part of this. It is, in some very
real sense, a way to announce things to the entire user community.

So what are its origins? Where did it first appear? I haven't dug into
this, but I imagine it was at Berkeley. What was it used for early on at
individual sites?

        - Dan C.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://minnie.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/attachments/20180315/d9912e94/attachment.html>


             reply	other threads:[~2018-03-15 15:29 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 12+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2018-03-15 15:29 Dan Cross [this message]
2018-03-15 15:35 ` Ron Natalie
2018-03-15 15:36   ` Chet Ramey
2018-03-15 15:41     ` Ron Natalie
2018-03-15 20:20     ` Dave Horsfall
2018-03-15 20:25       ` Warner Losh
2018-03-15 15:51 ` Clem Cole
2018-03-15 15:53   ` Clem Cole
2018-03-15 16:55   ` Ron Natalie
2018-03-15 18:04 ` Jeremy C. Reed
2018-03-15 20:00 Doug McIlroy
2018-03-15 20:51 ` Dave Horsfall

Reply instructions:

You may reply publicly to this message via plain-text email
using any one of the following methods:

* Save the following mbox file, import it into your mail client,
  and reply-to-all from there: mbox

  Avoid top-posting and favor interleaved quoting:
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_style#Interleaved_style

* Reply using the --to, --cc, and --in-reply-to
  switches of git-send-email(1):

  git send-email \
    --in-reply-to='CAEoi9W49jx_hrNd11meGGJi00cZ+FDs9BtB_W7b2c=drujzNSA@mail.gmail.com' \
    --to=crossd@gmail.com \
    /path/to/YOUR_REPLY

  https://kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-send-email.html

* If your mail client supports setting the In-Reply-To header
  via mailto: links, try the mailto: link
Be sure your reply has a Subject: header at the top and a blank line before the message body.
This is a public inbox, see mirroring instructions
for how to clone and mirror all data and code used for this inbox;
as well as URLs for NNTP newsgroup(s).