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Cyhist Dec 6, 1998 E
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========================================================================= Date: Sun, 6 Dec 1998 22:17:34 -0800
Reply-To: les@cs.stanford.edu
Sender: "CYHIST Community Memory: Discussion list on the History of
Cyberspace" <CYHIST@MAELSTROM.STJOHNS.EDU> From: Les Earnest <les@STEAM.STANFORD.EDU>
Subject: Re: Earliest "free software"
In-Reply-To: <19981203023357.A28971@thyrsus.com> (esr@THYRSUS.COM)
______________________________________________________________________
Community Memory: Discussion List on the History of Cyberspace ______________________________________________________________________
Eric S. Raymond writes:
Or, to put it another way: something subtle and important happened between about 1976 and 1985. In 1976 there were already Unix source tapes being passed around, and there was some source evolution and exchange going on between Bell Labs and places like Waterloo. But...
If I'm recalling my experience back then correctly, the concept of Internet-accessible source archives and the Internet itelf as a culture medium of free software hadn't really taken hold. And no great surprise, as online storage in general was hideously expensive, let alone network-accessible storage. The big, net-accessible FTP archives were still years in the future.
My recollection is quite different. Early commercial timesharing systems (circa 1966), such as the DEC PDP-6 and DEC-10, had no permanent secondary storage (disks). On the PDP-6 there was one System DECtape and individual users each mounted a personal DECtape, used it while running and dismounted it at the end of the session. Thus the only online files at any given moment were those on the rather small System tape and those of users who were logged in. In order to get a copy of a given program you generally had to negotiate with the author, who more often than not would be happy to make a copy at no cost and mail it to you if you were non-local.
It was also a tradition in that era at both MIT and Stanford to provide guest login privileges to anyone with a terminal who knew the computer's phone number. After awhile it became necessary to restrict what these "guests" could do and, after getting hacked some more, this privilege was revoked altogether by the late 1970s.
We (Stanford A.I. Lab) and others added disk files to these systems as soon as disks became readily available (late 1960s through early 1970s). Shortly after ARPAnet began working (1969) we began swiping software from each other on the net by anonymous FTP. The idea that anyone would read-protect their software was repugnant. In practice, the only things that were protected were buggy versions of programs, so that benign bandits could not pick up stuff that might bite them.
In other words, free software was a feature of ARPAnet and the later Internet from their beginnings. This was simply an extension of the widely held belief that all software should be free, which predated the development of networks and the rise of the hacker culture.
-Les Earnest
______________________________________________________________________
Reply-To: les@cs.stanford.edu
Sender: "CYHIST Community Memory: Discussion list on the History of
Cyberspace" <CYHIST@MAELSTROM.STJOHNS.EDU> From: Les Earnest <les@STEAM.STANFORD.EDU>
Subject: Re: Earliest "free software"
In-Reply-To: <19981203023357.A28971@thyrsus.com> (esr@THYRSUS.COM)
______________________________________________________________________
Community Memory: Discussion List on the History of Cyberspace ______________________________________________________________________
Eric S. Raymond writes:
Or, to put it another way: something subtle and important happened between about 1976 and 1985. In 1976 there were already Unix source tapes being passed around, and there was some source evolution and exchange going on between Bell Labs and places like Waterloo. But...
If I'm recalling my experience back then correctly, the concept of Internet-accessible source archives and the Internet itelf as a culture medium of free software hadn't really taken hold. And no great surprise, as online storage in general was hideously expensive, let alone network-accessible storage. The big, net-accessible FTP archives were still years in the future.
My recollection is quite different. Early commercial timesharing systems (circa 1966), such as the DEC PDP-6 and DEC-10, had no permanent secondary storage (disks). On the PDP-6 there was one System DECtape and individual users each mounted a personal DECtape, used it while running and dismounted it at the end of the session. Thus the only online files at any given moment were those on the rather small System tape and those of users who were logged in. In order to get a copy of a given program you generally had to negotiate with the author, who more often than not would be happy to make a copy at no cost and mail it to you if you were non-local.
It was also a tradition in that era at both MIT and Stanford to provide guest login privileges to anyone with a terminal who knew the computer's phone number. After awhile it became necessary to restrict what these "guests" could do and, after getting hacked some more, this privilege was revoked altogether by the late 1970s.
We (Stanford A.I. Lab) and others added disk files to these systems as soon as disks became readily available (late 1960s through early 1970s). Shortly after ARPAnet began working (1969) we began swiping software from each other on the net by anonymous FTP. The idea that anyone would read-protect their software was repugnant. In practice, the only things that were protected were buggy versions of programs, so that benign bandits could not pick up stuff that might bite them.
In other words, free software was a feature of ARPAnet and the later Internet from their beginnings. This was simply an extension of the widely held belief that all software should be free, which predated the development of networks and the rise of the hacker culture.
-Les Earnest
______________________________________________________________________
