Hacker News Reader

Comment by cossatot | Hacker News Reader

Is this a vision from a world without open source?

It's the world before the World Wide Web actually lived up to its name. At the time, they were entirely correct that getting their software pre-installed on Macs was the only way they could get it in the hands of most school users.

I worked at a university in Australia in from 1991 to 2003 in the IT department. Before the www there were huge open software repositories like info-Mac (and another that escapes me atm, maybe at Berkeley) openly accesible through ftp.

”…at a university…”

High schools were less likely to have access.

Even if they had, the average prospective Gaphing Calculator user wouldn’t be likely to have internet access there, wouldn’t have known the archives existed, and wouldn’t know how to use Kermit and BinHex to get the software on his Mac.

The PPC was introduced in 1994. The only way normal people downloaded software was via AOL, Compuserve, etc.

I was able to call into a free BBS run by the University of Georgia that ran a gopher server. Some way, I was able to telnet to Nyx and get a free shell account I could use to get to ftp freeware sites, but most people couldn't do that.

Open source existed, but wasn't as easy to distribute as it is now. I'm also not sure that the education-model Macs would've had a development environment installed to assemble the source (if the Macs I used in the mid-90s at school had software development tools, I was never aware of them, anyhow). And I'm not sure what the options would've looked like for acquiring an open-source set of dev tools for the Mac anyhow (especially considering that Power was a new, still rare hardware architecture at the time).

I'm not sure if MPW[1] was free when Graphing Calculator was written. It certainly wasn't easy to find or to use, though.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_Programmer%27s_Works...

This https://archive.org/details/TSLSummer1993 is how you got Open Source software before the Internet (back then called Shareware - although technically they are not the same thing).

BBS's existed but were too slow, and expensive.

Shareware isn't remotely the same as Open Source, though. It was a more-than-demo, more-than-full-version copy of a piece of commercial software, generally designed to be useful on its own, but not useful enough. It was a method of marketing the full version of the software.

I've got a few CDs of later collections of the stuff. I remember buying clamshell-packaged games for $5 from Software, Etc (that turned out to be the first 1/3 of the game, for example). I remember seeing the magazines to order it from. I'm aware of shareware, and it's not related to what I was talking about.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com