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Date: Sat, 10 Nov 2001 07:20:57 -0600
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
From: "Randal J. King" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: FC: Bill Gates: Open source software only exists 'cuz of
Microsoft
In-Reply-To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
At 12:23 PM 11/9/01 , you wrote:
>Date: Thu, 8 Nov 2001 17:43:07 -0500 (EST)
>Message-Id: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>From: Lenny Foner <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>Subject: Any more spin, and I'm going to throw up
>http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/134363780_microsof
>t08.html
>
> Gates also took some credit for the genesis of open-source software. He
> said
> Microsoft made it possible by standardizing computers: "Really, the
> reason you
> see open source there at all is because we came in and said there
> should be a
> platform that's identical with millions and millions of machines," he said.
>
>[Surely we don't have to point out that open-source software originated
>LOOOONNNNGGG before computers were smaller than the size of rooms,
>yes? At any number of government and research labs and universities,
>right? Well, maybe lots of people need to -keep- pointing this out.]
O.K. - I was an early (mid-70's) contributor to the Bell System operating
system called UNIX. Back in those days, computers were made out of wood
and we liked it that way. Memory was not measured in terms of Gb, Mb, or
even Kb, it was measured in terms of pounds because it was all iron
doughnuts called "core plane". My first big memory purchase was about
2.5lbs. I think this was 1Mb and it cost many thousands of
USD. Permanent, safe storage was saving your data to 8-level mylar punch tape.
A Bell System group out of Piscataway, N.J. was a distribution point for
UNIX to the world. Essentially, universities could order up a 9-track
800BPI tape with full source for the cost of the media. Two universities
that did this with what I consider to be the most visibility were Berkeley
and Purdue. Berkeley even re-wrote pieces of the source and re-distributed
it as the Berkeley Source Distribution (BSD-UNIX). Bill Joy (co-founder of
Sun) was very instrumental in leading the charge there.
Many other universities jumped on the bandwagon, and a little project that
got kicked off in the late 70's called "Netnews A", coupled with a defense
project called ARPAnet planted the seeds for today's Usenet and Internet,
respectively. Early telephone networking was done almost exclusively via
UUCP (UNIX-to-UNIX Copy Protocol), and later by a very robust version
called HoneyDanBer-UUCP (Peter Honeyman, David A. Nowitz, Brian E. Redmond,
authors). My hardware contribution was product manufacturing engineering
of the fastest modem at the time - the Bell System 212A "Data Set" -
screamin' 1200 baud. It, too, was about 2 pounds plus the wall brick.
I would counter that the only reason Microsoft exists to the level it does
is because of these early forward-thinking Bell System people, coupled with
the brilliance of people in the ARPA project like the late Jon Postel that
laid a foundation on which MS launched products. Granted, this success was
not handed to MS, and surely there is some contribution from Redmond, but I
would expect to see a little more homage being paid by them to the folks
who did the hard pioneering work and released their results openly to the
world.
Randy King
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