I was watching a video, the details of which I can not recall.
But the speaker was talking about how computing, historically, was a source code culture. He was citing IBM specifically, about how the relationship with the customer was focused on that hardware more so than the software, so they (IBM) didn't have an issue distributing source code to their clients, and that it wasn't until the early 80s that IBM switched from source code to binary artifiacts.
Now, I don't know anything about IBM, but I don't really recall much of this source code culture.
I mean, to be fair, early Unix was a distributed by source code. But I don't think any of the DEC stuff was, was it? I know when we had our 11/730, we have the huge stack of micro fiche with the VMS source printouts on them (a curiosity at best, not particularly useful outright). Did CDC distribute source code? DG? Any of the other large vendors of the day?
CP/M did, pretty much out of necessity. That was the time we were in, of course.
So, it's a mix.
But I would think that if there was a history of source code distributions of these legacy machines, then we'd have evidence of it today floating around.
Curious if others remember that time this way as well (I came a little late, late-70s.)
But the speaker was talking about how computing, historically, was a source code culture. He was citing IBM specifically, about how the relationship with the customer was focused on that hardware more so than the software, so they (IBM) didn't have an issue distributing source code to their clients, and that it wasn't until the early 80s that IBM switched from source code to binary artifiacts.
Now, I don't know anything about IBM, but I don't really recall much of this source code culture.
I mean, to be fair, early Unix was a distributed by source code. But I don't think any of the DEC stuff was, was it? I know when we had our 11/730, we have the huge stack of micro fiche with the VMS source printouts on them (a curiosity at best, not particularly useful outright). Did CDC distribute source code? DG? Any of the other large vendors of the day?
CP/M did, pretty much out of necessity. That was the time we were in, of course.
So, it's a mix.
But I would think that if there was a history of source code distributions of these legacy machines, then we'd have evidence of it today floating around.
Curious if others remember that time this way as well (I came a little late, late-70s.)