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ACP, One of the Oldest Open Source Apps
Esther Schindler writes "The Airline Control Program (ACP), introduced by IBM around 1967, predated the term 'open source' by decades. But you may be surprised by how much of its development resembles the FOSS movement today. The ITWorld.com article An Abbreviated History of ACP, One of the Oldest Open Source Applications describes what made it special."
"How it was" -- when the value of the system was concentrated in the hardware. The whole system was set up to serve the most valuable part, and software was seen as "directions to run the hardware" -- important, one supposed, but not the showy part. With commodity hardware, the value is in the bits and bytes now.
What about most device drivers? They still seem to be closed.
(RMS was angered when a printer manufacturer wouldn't supply the source code to the printer driver, IIRC.)
You're right in that a lot of "public domain" software was distributed as source, but there were no repositories - you could get the original version (or the latest version from the originators) or you could get varients from other developers, but it was rare to have a mechanism in place to submit changes anywhere or pass updates to all the users (remember - no internet, few modems, source mostly passed on 7 or 9 track tape reels).
When Bulletin Board Systems came into vogue in the late '70s, this started to change. In the original article what was unique was that changes could be submitted to IBM, who'd include them in later releases or distribute them as additional code with the source. The same was true of my own ealier post. If the code did not originate with Datapoint, they would forward submitted changes back to the author, who could incorporate them in later versions or allow Datapoint to distribute more than one version (early fork?).
It was not true OSS, but it was a clear pre-cursor.
...carrier dead.....