[cctalk] Re: Ward Christensen NY Times Obituary

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: doug(a)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(a)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?un… >> >> 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' >