UNIX might have been unobtainium in your home, but a lot of BBS's
used UUCP to get email and USENET connectivity, and a huge amount
of students had modem access to an UNIX computer at their university.
Julf
On 10/24/24 04:36, Doug Jackson via cctalk wrote:
Yes, UUCP was literally a thing, but UNIX was unobtanium in the early
computing eral - The world of the University Minicomputer.
It certainly wasn't even vaguely accessible by a hobbyist running a
Z80 or 6800 in the late 70's.
I vividly remember being able to take home a NEC 80386 computer from
my day job (I worked for a computer store selling NEC machines) during
the Christmas shutdown between 1987/1988 - It had SCO Xenix installed
and a new graphical system (To SCO) called 'XWindows' Unheard of - I
did a heap of learning.
That was probably the point where a UNIX like operating system became
accessible to people. Then 386BSD arrived (1993) and Linux came (1991)
into the scene and suddenly unix was everywhere - I still remember my
first stack of installation media for freeBSD - something like 10
1.4MB floppies for the Binaries, and another 10 for the source files.
So - yea, UUCP was around, but it wasn't alive in hobbyist circles.
Kindest regards,
Doug Jackson
em: d...@doughq.com
ph: 0414 986878
Follow my amateur radio adventures at vk1zdj.net
On Thu, 24 Oct 2024 at 11:39, Bill Gunshannon via cctalk
<cctalk@classiccmp.org> wrote:
On 10/23/2024 3:22 PM, Fred Cisin via cctalk wrote:
On Wed, 23 Oct 2024, Robert Feldman via cctalk wrote:
Ward Christensen, Early Visionary of Social Media, Dies at 78
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/21/technology/ward-christensen-dead.html?unlocked_article_code=1.UU4.nswM.540OUXuySX84&smid=url-share
Thank you for sharing that.
The author, presumably a heavy Reddit, TikTok and Facebook user, seemed
to have never heard about existence of computers before internet, nor
about any computer to computer connections other than internet. He does
not seem to know about anything except CBBS,and that solely because it
"resembles Facebook".
"Early Visionary of Social Media"
It is an adequately detailed story of his life, and mostly about CBBS
("a forerunner of Reddit, TikTok and Facebook")
A dozen paragraphs about CBBS, but XMODEM barely rated a mention, and
even there, only about its use on CBBS:
"In 1977, he developed a protocol, called XMODEM, for sending computer
files across phone lines; it was later used on C.B.B.S."
. . . "For decades, his license plate read, XMODEM."
Which had already been done with UUCP in 1976.
bill'
