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Cyhist Dec 3, 1998 I
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========================================================================= Date: Thu, 3 Dec 1998 17:52:09 -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: <Pine.LNX.3.95.981202023405.17731J-100000@behemoth.host4u.net>
(message from Doug Yowza on Wed, 2 Dec 1998 02:43:34 -0600)
______________________________________________________________________
Community Memory: Discussion List on the History of Cyberspace ______________________________________________________________________
In reponse to Eric Raymond's inquiry regarding the roots of the Internet "free software" culture, Doug Yowza writes:
You might consider looking at history of "user groups," which goes *way* back. The net simply facilitated the free sharing of user-writen apps.
Indeed, nearly all software source code was treated as "free" from the beginning of computer development through the mid-1960's and for about a decade longer in academia. Computer hardware was extremely expensive in that era, but programmers were delighted to give away their creations to anyone who could use them. Each kind of computer had a user group to facilitate the exchange of free software, such as SHARE for the IBM mainframe community and DECUS for DEC equipment. ACM published algorithms in higher level languages and also made them available in the form of card decks.
I recall an amusing incident around 1967 at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab (SAIL), when we got a Calcomp plotter and one of our graduate students (Bill Weiher) wrote a driver that facilitated putting text annotations on drawings. We were also directed at that time by the University administration to put room numbers on each door of our new facility, but Bill had a better idea: he named every room after a place mentioned in Tolkein's "Lord of the Rings" and then used the plotter to create both an annotated map of the facility and signs for each door, with the names printed in both the Latin alphabet and in Tolkein's made-up Elvish. For example, our food facility, which later had a computer-controlled vending machine, was called "The Prancing Pony" after an inn in Middle Earth. Bill then submitted the Calcomp software to DECUS and it was distributed around the world.
A short time later we received a Telex from a computer facility in Germany saying "What is Elvish? Please give references." We Telexed back a reference to Tolkein, which apparently met their need. Unfortunately the Stanford Administration was not satisfied with exotic room names -- they sent around a carpenter who screwed a number on each door.
The development of the ARPAnet and later the Internet greatly facilitated the distribution of free software. For example, I created what was evidently the first spelling checker around 1966, but as far as I know it never migrated outside of SAIL. A few years later, after ARPAnet started up, a grad student named Ralph Gorin created an improved version that did spelling correction. We put the source code in an unprotected public area, as we did with most of our software, and it promptly spread around the DEC-10/20 world. The same thing happened after I created the FINGER program, which then migrated to the Unix world and elsewhere. We too swiped software from throughout academia using anonymous FTP, especially from CMU and MIT.
David Wittenberg mentions examples of freeware:
For more portable code, TeX was available by 1978, and news by the early 80s. Adventure spread widely even earlier than that.
Indeed, Don Knuth developed TeX on the SAIL computer and Don Woods developed his version of Adventure there, from where it spread around the world. By the time that TeX was developed, Stanford had an official policy saying that softare developed on their facilities by employees (including faculty) had to be licensed. Don Knuth ignored that rule and gave TeX away. He had enough clout to get away with it.
When I later founded IMAGEN Corporation to manufacture and sell desktop publishing systems using laser printers (under license from Stanford), we recruited Don to be on our board of directors. Unfortunately that was not a comfortable position for him -- he wanted to give everything away, which was not compatible with our business plan.
-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: <Pine.LNX.3.95.981202023405.17731J-100000@behemoth.host4u.net>
(message from Doug Yowza on Wed, 2 Dec 1998 02:43:34 -0600)
______________________________________________________________________
Community Memory: Discussion List on the History of Cyberspace ______________________________________________________________________
In reponse to Eric Raymond's inquiry regarding the roots of the Internet "free software" culture, Doug Yowza writes:
You might consider looking at history of "user groups," which goes *way* back. The net simply facilitated the free sharing of user-writen apps.
Indeed, nearly all software source code was treated as "free" from the beginning of computer development through the mid-1960's and for about a decade longer in academia. Computer hardware was extremely expensive in that era, but programmers were delighted to give away their creations to anyone who could use them. Each kind of computer had a user group to facilitate the exchange of free software, such as SHARE for the IBM mainframe community and DECUS for DEC equipment. ACM published algorithms in higher level languages and also made them available in the form of card decks.
I recall an amusing incident around 1967 at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab (SAIL), when we got a Calcomp plotter and one of our graduate students (Bill Weiher) wrote a driver that facilitated putting text annotations on drawings. We were also directed at that time by the University administration to put room numbers on each door of our new facility, but Bill had a better idea: he named every room after a place mentioned in Tolkein's "Lord of the Rings" and then used the plotter to create both an annotated map of the facility and signs for each door, with the names printed in both the Latin alphabet and in Tolkein's made-up Elvish. For example, our food facility, which later had a computer-controlled vending machine, was called "The Prancing Pony" after an inn in Middle Earth. Bill then submitted the Calcomp software to DECUS and it was distributed around the world.
A short time later we received a Telex from a computer facility in Germany saying "What is Elvish? Please give references." We Telexed back a reference to Tolkein, which apparently met their need. Unfortunately the Stanford Administration was not satisfied with exotic room names -- they sent around a carpenter who screwed a number on each door.
The development of the ARPAnet and later the Internet greatly facilitated the distribution of free software. For example, I created what was evidently the first spelling checker around 1966, but as far as I know it never migrated outside of SAIL. A few years later, after ARPAnet started up, a grad student named Ralph Gorin created an improved version that did spelling correction. We put the source code in an unprotected public area, as we did with most of our software, and it promptly spread around the DEC-10/20 world. The same thing happened after I created the FINGER program, which then migrated to the Unix world and elsewhere. We too swiped software from throughout academia using anonymous FTP, especially from CMU and MIT.
David Wittenberg mentions examples of freeware:
For more portable code, TeX was available by 1978, and news by the early 80s. Adventure spread widely even earlier than that.
Indeed, Don Knuth developed TeX on the SAIL computer and Don Woods developed his version of Adventure there, from where it spread around the world. By the time that TeX was developed, Stanford had an official policy saying that softare developed on their facilities by employees (including faculty) had to be licensed. Don Knuth ignored that rule and gave TeX away. He had enough clout to get away with it.
When I later founded IMAGEN Corporation to manufacture and sell desktop publishing systems using laser printers (under license from Stanford), we recruited Don to be on our board of directors. Unfortunately that was not a comfortable position for him -- he wanted to give everything away, which was not compatible with our business plan.
-Les Earnest
______________________________________________________________________
