[H-GEN] Who are we? What are we doing? How did it come to this?

[Paul Gearon]

On Wed, May 16, 2012 at 7:02 PM, James C. McPherson
<james.c.mcpherson at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 17/05/12 02:59 AM, Paul Gearon wrote:
>>
>> On Wed, May 16, 2012 at 4:56 AM, Benjamin Fowler
>> <ben.fowler.bjf at gmail.com <mailto:ben.fowler.bjf at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
>
>>> The only message I really got out of chats with some of the
>>> founding members of HUMBUG over the years, is that the intent of
>>> HUMBUG was for people interested in tinkering with Unix-like
>>> operating systems at home, free or proprietary, to come together to
>>> swap tips and stories and socialize. There was nothing in our
>>> mission about advocating for Free, or Open Source software, per
>>> se.
>
>
> That's what I recall too. The founding group (I include myself
> in that, since I was there and took part) was cognizant that there
> was more than just one Unix or Unix-like OS to use on a system at
> home, and it was recognised that we could learn from everybody
> else's experiences with those different environment. As students
> we had access to OSF/1 from Prentice-maintained systems, those of
> us in Maths and Physics had SunOS and Solaris access. Those who
> were lucky enough to have access to VISLAB could use Irix. Why
> exclude people just because their options at home were limited
> by the hardware available?

Remembering that it wasn't just students. I *was* a student at the
time, but also working, and had access to Solaris that way. (I got to
take it home and install it too)

>> When I first joined HUMBUG (I forget... was it '94 or '95?) I used
>> Solaris, as did at least one other member I can name (but he'd
>> probably prefer I didn't drag his name into it).
>
>
> It's ok, I took my cloak off years ago. I just used Solaris at work
> in UQLibraries though, home use was several years later, and in the
> meantime I had Linux to keep me going.

Nope, wasn't talking about you.  :-)

>> I didn't start using
>> Linux until '97. Others were using various flavours of BSD. HUMBUG
>> was about learning and exploring the various flavours of Unix-like
>> operating systems in period when Windows was making life miserable
>> for most of the world. Of course, Linux was extremely popular in
>> HUMBUG, and became a de facto standard for the home *nix community
>> shortly thereafter. But unless something changed that I didn't hear
>> about, HUMBUG explicitly supports all Unix and Unix-like operating
>> systems.
>
>
> I don't recall there being any constitutional change to remove the
> acceptance of Unix/Unix-likes other than linux.

I recall discussions around how inclusive we should be. After all,
most of the Unix-like behavior we supported was present in U/Win and
even Cygwin. And if you accept the Hurd, then you should also accept
OSX... though I seem to recall that Apple did bother a few people. Did
anyone ever bring a BeOS box?

When it came down to it, we were really interested in anything to do
with computers that didn't involve Windows, since 90% of the world was
involved with Windows at the time, and that system was painful, buggy,
proprietary in the worst possible ways, and actively discouraged
people from finding out how things worked (must more so than other
proprietary systems of the day).

Paul