Google Goes Back 20

This past Monday morning I was talking
with my pal Michael Stern, the part-time
hacker and
full-time CEO of
Information
Markets Corp. Among other things, Michael shared his relief
that Google hadn't yet
indexed the Usenet newsgroup
archive back any farther than 1995.Later that day I received an e-mail from a contact at Google
giving me a heads-up about the next day's announcement that their
newsgroup archive now goes back to 1981. I'm sure Michael isn't the
only one who cringed when he heard the news.How about Bill Gates? Turns out the
very
first mention of Microsoft is this one, posted to
net.general:The June issue of BYTE magazine has a fairly long
article on XENIX by Microsoft's XENIX product manager. Mostly, it's
a standard "What's a UNIX" paper, but it also describes some of the
enhancements they are adding to V7. The most important is support;
additionally, they are going to add a fair amount of hardware error
recovery (bad block handling, parity and power fail interrupts,
etc.), as well as record handling, shared data segments,
synchronous writing, improved interprocess communications,
networking, and languages: Pascal, BASIC, FORTRAN, and
COBOL.Of the thirteen posts mentioning Microsoft in 1981, most
involved UNIX. One post to fa.unix-wizards almost poignantly points
out the problem with closed-source code:You CAN'T in general assume people can go look at
the source to figure out what an error means. Aside from the
obvious fact that there are lots of users who don't speak C, recall
that to get Unix a (non-Bell) site has to sign in blood a promise
not to give out the sources to anyone. Many sites (especially
University Computer Centers, who don't trust their users) protect
/usr/src. (I know of one comp ctr at an unnamed major university in
Berkeley that doesn't even make df suid because "It's none of your
business if the disks are full". Since they also overbook disk
quotas, which they have, this is a fun place to try to get any work
done.) An even worse case is typified by Onyx, Microsoft, and other
turnkey Unix system sources who don't let you have ANY sources.
This is how a small business can afford to buy Unix - to not pay
for a full source license. These poor guys can't go look at the
source, and I can't tell you how many times I've wished I could in
order to pinpoint some bug.Other goodies in the archive include:

• Richard Stallman's
  announcement
  of GNU
• CERN's
  announcement
  of the World Wide Web
• Linus'
  first
  pitch for Linux, which he called "a free version of a
  minix-lookalike for AT-386 computers"
• The debate thread that began with
  Andy
  Tanenbaum's "LINUX is obsolete" post
• The first
  mention
  of Linux Journal

So what else is back there? You tell us. If they're fun,
interesting and publishable, I'd like to run some of them in the
UpFront section of the next issue of Linux
Journal (with credit where due, of course).Doc Searls is senior editor
of Linux Journal.

email: doc@ssc.com