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."

Comments

Anonymous Coward

[Anonymous Coward]

This was how it was back in the days, and that is why RMS started GNU and FSF, to keep it that way.

Re:Anonymous Coward

[xaxa]

"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.)

Re:Anonymous Coward

[MasterOfMagic]

RMS was angered when a printer manufacturer wouldn't supply the source code to the printer driver, IIRC.

And what most people miss about this story is not just that the manufacturer wouldn't provide the driver. It was that they refused to provide the driver so that rms could modify it so that MIT could use the hardware in the way that they pleased after paying for it.

The device was a shiny new laser printer. rms wanted to add a feature to the driver - notifying someone when (not if) the printer jammed so that print jobs wouldn't get backed up when the printer jammed without having to have someone babysit the printer. The printer maker (I believe it was Xerox, but I could be wrong on this part) didn't want to give up the source because they were afraid that it contained trade secrets because they were the only game in town for laser printing.

The refusal of source code for drivers goes on today, mainly from wireless manufacturers (with the added point that they feel they might be liable if someone violates an FCC reg because they tweaked the driver) and the video card makers.

Re:It's not open source.

[X0563511]

I think you are confusing Open Source with Free Software.

OS not DOS

[Anonymous Coward]

It was not IBM's DOS that inspired _The Mythical Man Month_. It was IBM's OS.

They cobbled together DOS because OS was so late.

OS is now z/OS.

DOS is now z/VSE.

Re:OS not DOS

[Spiked_Three]

Agreed - DOS had nothing to do with it.

But dont forget VM, the first virtualization OS that I know of - and I dont know much about non-ibm computers of that time - but it came out of the necessity of the people who started running DOS while waiting for OS to get finished, and then couldnt afford 2 computers to run simultaneously while they migrated from DOS to OS. and of course, it is now z/VM - and more often used as part of the hardware microcode providing hardware partitioning.

All early IBM OSs had the source freely available, DOS, OS and VM. I do not think the license restricted redistribution either, since it was available freely from the vendor. The OSs did not become 'licensed' until IBM got tired of supplying the OS for competing hardware - Amdal - and in my mind you can blame the entire software licensing mess of today on a hardware vendor too lazy to write (significant portions of) its own software, and mostly interested in hardware only profits (wow, sounds vaguely familiar even today).

Anyhow, I was one of those geeky systems programmer guys, making operating system level changes to source code - I never saw it as open source movement though, just something we did to make the OS better fit our needs. 90% of what we needed could be done with vendor supplied 'hooks' that we shimmed in our 'exits' at. I wish more of that kind of thing still existed in all OSs.

Re:It's not open source.

[gparent]

Open source means the code is available. Nothing else.

What you're looking for is GNU/Freedom.

Re:It's not open source.

[maxume]

So says OSI, but they haven't actually managed to establish legal control over the term 'open source', so at best, the definition is contested, at worst, there are multiple meanings.

Re:for a moment, i read that as "ATC"

[HogGeek]

Is this it?

http://hpux.connect.org.uk/hppd/hpux/Games/Arcade/atc-1.0/

Re:It's not open source.

[koiransuklaa]

What the hell is wrong with moderators today? This is not insightful or informative... loufoque make a perfectly valid point. ACP may resemble open source, but it is not open source.

Claiming that the definition of open source does not include redistribution rights is revisionist, if not totally absurd.

Ummm, Spacewar!?

[Maury Markowitz]

"open source" was the norm for almost all programs in the 1960s. Spacewar was certainly as open as ATP, or more so by most definitions (no commercial claims at all), and was released in 1962. Source code for earlier games, like Nim and Wumpus, were widely available as well.

This author appears to be committing the sin of omission, conflating his IBM-centric experience with the wider world.

Maury

Re:Ummm, Spacewar!?

[mrisaacs]

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.

Re:Ummm, Spacewar!?

[Maury Markowitz]

> 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).

Actually both existed. Spacewar! was distributed primarily in paper-tape form, patches were contributed with paper, scissors and tape.

No, really.

Maury

Re:Definition 1, Definition 2, etc.

[jedidiah]

"speciality coffee" isn't a specifically crafted term of art invented by a particular organization.

"Open Source" is.