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ACP, One of the Oldest Open Source Apps

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the before-there-was-github dept.

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."

1 of 102 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Anonymous Coward by xaxa · · Score: 4, Interesting

    "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.)