I get caught up in a lot of nostalgia at times, and enjoy filling in some gaps in my memories with more knowledge of what happened in that era. Due to certain circumstances in my childhood, I was exposed to a lot of IBM PC specific computing. I ended up via hand me down equipment experiencing MS-DOS and 8088, 286, 386, and 486 computing before catching up to what was modern then. Along the way I learned about DR-DOS and other OS choices, 4DOS as a command.com replacement, etc. This lead to some wandering into OS/2 and BeOS in the 90s. I however didn't have hands on experience with the big UNIX names of that era till later, nor was I even aware of some of the computing landscape at the time.

One of the things that intrigued me about UNIX in particular was how there were many variants of it released by many companies for different purposes, while still maintaining some compatibility with each other. I later learned this was partially due to a lot of standards like POSIX, with the rest being that UNIX has seen many forks since it's creation at Bell Labs.

That sharing between systems is what introduced me to the idea of open source. And in an era when Microsoft's illegal use of it's monopoly power started directly impacting my career, I also saw a rising champion of the open source movement making some big strides.

Ever since a particular moment in the late 90s realizing how much more computer history there was to explore, I started digging. My job led me to work at some fantastic places to help enable this, including working at a place that had every system DEC shipped up and running somewhere. Part of that digging was tracing both standards like POSIX and open source movements. And parts were talking to the older workers who experienced the past as it happened.

I am seeing the value of open source more and more as my career progresses, and more then just open source, the open sharing of ideas and ways to solve problems. It seems this open sharing was fundamental to the spread of UNIX even when much of it wasn't open source.

Where I'm at these days is learning more about the relationships between the big computer companies of the time and how this helped push things forward in areas. Sun seems foundational to so much, as does DEC to me.


Okay, so background aside, there was a longstanding claim made by Apple on their open source landing page that they were the first major computer company to embrace open source software key to their development. It's since been changed as a result of backlash when Swift went open source, however what was never answered in my mind was who was the first? I get that the claim was grandiose and likely untrue, but it was disheartening to see the level of trolling and rage that was released as a result of people seeing it. In trying to trace their claim, I came across information about GCC being critical to NextSTEP, and I'm slowly reading some old newsgroups to learn more about that situation. NextSTEP intrigues me for so many reasons, and it's a company I wish I had paid attention to in the era before Apple bought them. Their name and work did come up when researching the open connections between companies, such as the efforts around OpenSTEP, and the connections to GNU project.

What other (pre Linux) moves were being made in open source or general open sharing that you are aware of in the PC era? I see the PC era as starting in the hobby realm in the 70s, and solidifying more in the 80s before the Microsoft 90s monopoly days. Linux has the benefit of being created and existing mostly in the more modern internet era leading to a well documented history. What is harder to dig into is the ties that existed before then.

I had a similar post prior to the holidays that I removed prior to my trip home. I'd like to foster some fun nostalgic discussion of tech here, and felt the first response last time was going against that spirit. I'm not going to moderate or admin duties this time, as I feel this community still can have healthy discussions overall even with the shrinking user base.