Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.
Re: BSD, BIND, Sendmail
Author: Paul Merrell Posted: 8/24/2000; 12:17:06 AM Topic: Another key question Msg #: 20069 (In response to 20052) Prev/Next: 20068 / 20070
As I recall my DEC PDP-8 days, there wasn't much else. You can take it back a lot further if you want to loosen the definition of "software" to include software's antecedents, like notches on a stick, knots in strings, smoke signals, hieroglyphs, the abacus, semaphore, telegraphy (the birth of digital distributed computing environments complete with message routing headers), teletype, the Associated Press and United Press International distributed networks for queing and moving first news then also delivering punched paper tape for automated Linotypes via teletypesetting, and the movement of teletype and teletypesetting codes to vacuum tube computers in the 50s, followed by the early phototypesetting "area composition" structure that replaced the "line of type" paradigm and led directly to bit-mapping of cathode ray tubes, then on to modern desktop publishing. See generally, http://www.mediahistory.com/time/alltime.htmlIf you look at software development through that set of eyes, the early history of software was predominantly "open source," with "closed source" software being a pretty recent phenomenon that really didn't begin to take root until the end of the CPM era, then exploded to the dominant paradigm very roughly around the time the IBM PC and DOS were displacing CPM and other 8-bit operating systems. In a very real sense, software mostly wasn't closed source until the hardware became very cheap. Before then, the expense of hardware was a formidable barrier for folks who might have otherwise been inclined to pirate software. Even for some time after the microcomputer revolution rolled around, open source software dominated. I know I still have scads of CPM software tucked away somewhere that I acquired during the hobby microcomputer era, complete with source code. Much of it had copyright claimed, but the source was still provided. Specifically, I recall that Ward Christianson distributed most of his code that way and he was a very influential early programmer for the CPM platform.
For what it's worth, my first intense encounters with computers came in the 60s in the newspaper printing industry when computers were first employed to handle transformation of what we called "idiot" teletypesetter punched paper tape input into justified lines of output tape for use on Linotypes with mechanical tape readers, thereby eliminating the need to hire folks skilled enough to hyphenate words properly and justify lines manually. So I probably have a bias toward the technology that eventually led to desktop publishing and probably tend to underestimate the contribution to modern software of early "closed source" systems like encrypted military communicatons systems that relied heavily on technologies also used in the civil sector.
As an aside, if there are any other punched paper tape throwbacks drifting through, you might enjoy the University of Amsterdam's collection of punched paper tape and contemporary codes at http://www.science.uva.nl/faculteit/museum/DWcodes.html and the great 1969 quote from Isaac Asimov they feature at http://www.science.uva.nl/faculteit/museum/papertape.html with a nifty animation of a punched paper tape reader. (Considering that reading those codes directly from the tape was the old "graphical user interface," you might get a glimmer of why I love WordPerfect's Reveal Codes feature so much.)
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