1 Nov
2024
1 Nov
'24
5:15 p.m.
For a few year VMS was the OS of the "internet". I remember wondering in
1991 or 1992 if UNIX would still be around by 2000
On Fri, Nov 1, 2024, 4:42 PM Johan Helsingius via cctalk <
cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> wrote:
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: 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'
>