The Amateur

Computerist

Winter/Spring 1993 Volume 5 No. 1- 2

Table of Contents

Interview with Henry Spencer.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Page 1

Tradition of May 1, 1848. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Page 18

Social Forces Behind Usenet. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Page 23

The Net and the Labor Movement. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Page 39

Letters to Editor. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Page 42

From the Shop Floor: The New Dawn. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Page 44

From the Shop Floor: Pittsburgh Press Strike.. . . . . . . . . . . . . Page 45

John G. Kemeny. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Page 48

Computers for the People: Part V. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Page 55

Try This: Pascal Program. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Page 59

Try This: Program in C. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Page 62

May Day in History.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Page 65

Charter for Newsgroup. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Page 66

“For we can’t command Nature except by obeying her”

Sir Francis Bacon

Interview with Henry Spencer:

On Usenet News and ‘C news’

[Editor’s Note: Henry Spencer is one of the early participants and

pioneers of Usenet News. Henry played a significant role in bringing

Usenet News into Canada and thus providing access to and participation

Webpage: http://www.ais.org/~jrh/acn/

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in Usenet beyond U.S. borders. In addition, Henry archived much of

early Usenet, thus helping preserve it. Along with Geoff Collyer, Henry

wrote ‘C news,’ the widely used Usenet News software. Following is an

interview with Henry conducted by some of the editors of the Amateur

Computerist in Toronto, Canada in August, 1992.]

Ronda: Some of what we would be interested in knowing is where

‘C news’ came from, how it developed and what your efforts are to deal

with it now. We thought it would be helpful to ask a bit about your

background with Usenet News so that we have a sense of how ‘C news’

grew out of your experience with Usenet News and out of Usenet News

itself. So our first question is, can you say a bit about when you first

became involved with Usenet News and then how that involvement with

Usenet led you to understand the need for the ‘C news’ program?

Henry: Well, there was a USENIX Conference 10 years or so ago.

I think it was the Delaware Summer USENIX Conference, which was

the Summer of 1980. The folks from Duke University made a presenta-

tion on a bit of networking software they had done. Version 7 UNIX,

which was more or less just out at the time, had some facilities for using

auto dialing modems to pass mail and other things from machine to

machine. This wasn’t terribly well understood by most people. But these

folks had figured it out and made it work. They were using it as a sort of

distributed bulletin board system. The software they came up with is

now known as ‘A news.’ It was actually the second or third version they

did internally, the first one that was circulated widely outside. Early on,

Duke was sort of the central point. The topology of the net sort of evolv-

ed from there in random and confused ways. Partly, it was just a neat

idea. There was a lot of interest here in networking in general. A lot of

the early traffic was potentially very useful things like bug reports on

version 7 and bug fixes for version 7. There were some interesting and

potentially useful contacts available through it, like for example, you

could send mail to Dennis Ritchie and people like that at Bell Labs and

sometimes they’d even answer you. So it looked useful. There was a bit

of delay in us getting things in place. A lot of sites took a lot of time in

switching to version 7. But in the Spring of ‘81 we cut over to version

7. One of the first things we did was to establish a Usenet hookup. In the

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early days, manually dialing at 300 baud was a bit of a hassle. Of course,

the traffic was a lot smaller than it is now. But it was valuable enough

that we progressed from there. We got a 1200 baud modem and the

capabilities just kept on scaling up, more or less keeping pace with the

traffic. For a while, the phone bills were kind of interesting to explain.

I’m glad we’re no longer in that business. But that’s how our involve-

ment really got started.

Eventually ‘B news’ came out as an improved version of ‘A news,’

better performance, better ability to cope with heavier loads and some

other useful features. We were eventually bullied into adopting it. ‘A

news’ was working OK for us for a long time, but some of our neighbors

eventually bullied us into switching. There were enough compatibility

problems between the two that it was better if everyone ran ‘B news.’

Things ran quite satisfactorily that way for quite a while. But the ‘B

news’ code was an awful mess inside. It just got worse over time. It had

started out as a heavily mutated ‘A news’ and progressed from there

mostly downhill. So we first got involved with it when ‘B news’

“expire” just basically stopped working due to bugs.

Ronda: Can you say what bugs?

Henry: Probably, the way it looked was a memory leak, dynami-

cally allocated memory that wasn’t being freed properly. This got more

and more serious as traffic grew and “expire” had to handle more and

more stuff. Eventually, it just broke entirely. This was a 16 bit machine,

so there wasn’t a whole lot of memory available to begin with. I looked

at the code and decided that it wasn’t really doing anything very

complicated and it would probably be quicker to just rewrite it than fix

it as it had gotten to be quite a mess by that point. I did and there are still

remnants of that code in ‘C news’ “expire” as it is today. But that’s how

things got started. Geoff Collyer and I basically just progressed more

and more in that direction as ‘B news’ limitations got to be more and

more of a problem. The load on our machines got worse and worse as

the traffic grew. The bugs grew more and more troublesome. So we

eventually decided just to rewrite it for better performance and better

maintainability and over time did so. All along we had the notion of

distributing it in our minds. That’s just the way we tend to think about

software development. There’s always somebody else who could benefit

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from something like this. Eventually, with some prodding from our

friends, we got everything together and produced an actual release. It’s

needed some more work since, but that’s how it got started.

Ronda: So somehow from having redone “expire” you went on to

redo the whole program? Did rewriting the code for “expire” help you

to realize there was something more needed? How did you go from

rewriting the code for “expire” to deciding the whole Netnews program

would benefit from being rewritten?

Henry: It was basically just sort of a logical progression. Doing

“expire” – something had to come first – and this demystified the stuff,

not that it was particularly mysterious to begin with for the most part,

and got us started in the right direction. And things progressed from

there.

Ronda: Can you say just a bit about what “expire” does in Usenet

News?

Henry: “Expire” is just responsible for getting rid of articles off

your system. Much of the rest of ‘C news’ is devoted to getting them

onto your system from a remote site or from local postings. “Expire’s”

job is to get rid of news that’s been sitting around long enough, where

the definition of “long enough” has gotten shorter and shorter as volume

has grown and disks haven’t grown to match. There was a time when it

was fairly normal to keep a month of news online. And while it’s not

impossible, today you have to spend a lot of disk to do it.

Ronda: The issue of the change in definition of “long enough”

seems important. With regard to “expire,” when you did rewrite

“expire,” was that when you were able to keep one month of news

online?

Henry: I think we had about a month online. Certainly it was of

that order. It was at least a couple of weeks and I wouldn’t be surprised

if it was a month. I haven’t really kept track. This all started quite a long

time ago and volume was pretty low then.

Ronda: What do you mean by volume being low? How would you

define the number of news groups at the time?

Henry: Low in just about every way. I don’t know, maybe a

hundred newsgroups, with maybe a couple hundred sites I’m not sure.

Just a wild guess. The traffic at that point was low enough that if you

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wanted to spend the time, you could realistically read everything that

came over.

Ronda: Were there people who read it all?

Henry: A reasonable number of people actually read everything.

It wasn’t till the volume started to become overwhelming that people

just had to get selective. There was always the possibility of something

interesting cropping up in an area you didn’t normally read. The

possibility is still there, but it’s no longer practical to do very much

about it, short of having friends alert you to something.

Ronda: What year are we talking about when you started to see the

problem with “expire”? Was that around 1986?

Henry: No that would be early 1980s. The development period for

this stuff was fairly protracted. It went through a lot of work of one kind

or another before we released it. And even that wasn’t all that recent. Let

me see here. [Calls document up on his computer -ed] Well, our first

patches were summer 1989, so Spring 1989 must have been the

production release. But that was a year or more after an alpha release

and stuff had been kicking around in embryonic form for several years

before that. We never did mount a systematic campaign to do the whole

thing. It just grew a bit at a time until we finally decided it was complete

enough to try and get something out the door. It required a surprising

amount of work to put everything together actually in distributable form.

And it involved some surprises in our beta testing, portability hassles we

hadn’t been aware of, and systems differing in stupid ways we hadn’t

realized.

Ronda: You’ve said you were first interested in Usenet because of

the bug reports for UNIX that it carried. Can you explain a bit more

about that?

Henry: The Duke people originally thought that the bulk of the

traffic on Usenet was going to be things like version 7 bug reports. And

that was a noticeable fraction in the very early days.

Ronda: Was Usenet different in the ways it dealt with bug reports

from other BBS’s?

Michael: Did it have other methods cause I guess a lot of compa-

nies have various forms of support?

Henry: Well, for one thing, Usenet predated a lot of company

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BBS’s and the like. It was basically a cheap way to hear about things

fast and this was at a time when practically every UNIX site had

complete sources and so a bug report often came with a fix. It was a way

of finding out what people had discovered and what fixes they’d worked

out for it. Quickly and easily. And for that matter, if you ran into some-

thing that you couldn’t solve yourself, putting out an inquiry to a bunch

of fairly bright people who were fairly familiar with the code, often got

a response, “Oh Yeah. We solved that one” or “You’re right. There is a

bug. Here’s how to fix it” or sympathy even if no one had a fix for it.

Ronda: You mentioned something about noticing a particular bug

in the PDP-11 that was an obscure bug.

Henry: This was something that was a problem in the long division

routine in the C compiler that came with V7 and it was obscure and

difficult to spot on the older PDP-11's. On the newer ones it was more

conspicuous. One of our users ran into it, pointed it out to me, and I

ended up investigating it and reporting it. On the new PDP-11's, it

showed up a fair bit and you just had to fix it. Even on the older

PDP-11's, it turns out that 2 or 3 things that were known as obscure

problems in the stuff magically went away when the fix was installed.

What was happening was the code tried using the PDP-11's divide

instruction at one point. There was a possibility the result might

overflow because the PDP-11 instruction wasn’t up to doing the whole

job of this particular requirement. If the overflow occurred, the code

assumed that the registers which had held the dividend were untouched.

On older PDP-11's, that was usually true but DEC had never promised

it. On the newer PDP-11's, it was often false. Any combination of

operands that led into that particular branch in the code produced grossly

wrong answers. But it looks like some boundary cases, even on old

PDP-11's, didn’t work quite right, because there were a couple of things

mentioned as very obscure known bugs in the division stuff that I

couldn’t reproduce once I put the fix in. So it may have been there all

along and just nobody had analyzed it.

Ronda: What’s the process of analyzing a bug? You mentioned

something about documenting it.

Henry: Oh, there were a couple of problems noted, as known

defects in the software. There is something the UNIX community has

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always been fairly strong on, admitting things you know just don’t work

about the software. And this was mentioned in the sources in bits of

documentation accompanying them, that there were a couple of cases

that didn’t work quite right. In this case, I had a user of mine who had

run into this. He had actually supplied a case where the answer was just

plain wrong. It was just a matter of digging in. I think I ended up

inserting some debugging printouts at various points in the routine, and

just finding out what was going on where the calculation was going

awry. Once I knew where to look, the problem was pretty obvious and

the fix, in fact, was about 4 lines of code. That was probably one of the

first things that started to make my reputation on the net because a lot of

people noticed when I posted that.

Ronda: Why?

Henry: Because it was a really obscure problem that had the

potential to make a lot of trouble for people. It was something in that it

was subtle code that was from the originators of UNIX themselves,

something they’d missed.

Ronda: That’s interesting. So the reason people respected the bug

you found was because they understood the significance of the problem

that had been averted?

Henry: Yes, it was a subtle problem that could have caused a lot of

trouble in code, coming from people who were normally pretty good.

Ronda: So are you saying that one is encouraged to find what

could be problems that could cause trouble despite who it’s coming

from? And then to suggest how to deal with it?

Henry: Yes, it’s diminished some in recent years because such a

large fraction of UNIX sites nowadays do not have sources for the code.

But in those days, it was reasonably normal when you hit some sort of

problem to go looking for what caused it and produce a fix for it. Partly,

this has declined because people no longer have sources and partly it’s

declined because the community is a lot wider and many of the people

using and even running UNIX systems don’t have the technical expertise

to go hunting for things like this. But, hey, it was very common at the

time. This was in the days when UNIX was still treated by the Bell

system as, “Oh just something we happen to do for our internal use. You

can have a copy if you want, but if you got problems, don’t bother us.”

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And the result was if you wanted UNIX support, you did it yourself or

it didn’t happen.

Ronda: It sounds then like people trained themselves to deal with

problems.

Henry: To a considerable extent, yes. The people got to know how

to deal with the things and the community. This is almost certainly one

of the things that got Usenet going in the beginning. Having quick

access to a community of experienced people was quite important in the

days when you couldn’t just call the manufacturer for support. If you

called Bell Labs or Western Electric, as it was then, about it, they would

hang up on you. If you could manage to get through to Ken Thompson

or Dennis Ritchie, they might thank you for the bug report. But they

certainly weren’t going to promise anything like support.

Ronda: Do you miss that in any way?

Henry: To some extent, yes. To some extent it’s the community

I’m still in because we’ve been running obsolete versions of UNIX for

a long time. And still are. On our Sun, our main time sharing machine,

we’re running the last stable version of Sun OS 3.5. Sun will hang up on

you if you ask about it now. And so we’re still used to doing our own

support, handling our own problems. Unfortunately, because UNIX has

grown so much and diversified so much, there’s less of a sense of

community of others lending a hand now. Too many people with too

many different machines and too many different versions.

Jay: But has the spirit and the sense of that somehow given form

to the Usenet community, the grander community?

Henry: It’s still there to some extent. But it’s diffused considerably

from what it was.

Ronda: Is there any way that the bug reports led to the other kinds

of discussions? Is there any connection between them? Or is it just that

people were interested in other areas?

Henry: It [the bug report -ed] was incentive to get onto the network

more than anything else. So you could hear about things like this. People

have commented also that the USENIX conferences are in some ways

less of a hotbed of gossip than they used to be because the net has taken

over some of that function. You know it used to be – back in the very

early days, when you went to a USENIX conference, more often than

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not, you came back with a notebook full of notes on known bugs and

what to do about them. And new software available and so forth. The

bulk of that goes on via the net nowadays. Things have changed, but

originally getting onto the net, the big thing was getting access to the

community that knew about these things. And the rest of it was a

secondary issue originally. There was a group talking about science

fiction, for example. But this wasn’t why system administrators were hot

on getting their machines connected. Well, not most them. And then,

generally, this was a way of doing networking on the cheap. It was a

vigorous online community that you could join without spending many

dollars and jumping through lots of bureaucratic hoops, to join some-

thing like the ARPAnet. With this, all you needed was an auto-dialing

modem and someone who was willing to be your connection point.

Ronda: Somehow it seems that having the other discussions is

important, also, to the technical discussions. Do you agree? Is there a

connection between the technical and nontechnical discussions?

Henry: They [the nontechnical discussions -ed] helped broaden

support for things. I don’t think they really had very much of an effect

on the technical end. Then, as now, there are a lot of people who justify

the net primarily in terms of its technical benefits. People are heard to

claim sometimes, “I like the net for the tiny minority of technical stuff,

but all this non-technical trash I could do without.” But in fact, it has

been a standard misunderstanding from the early days, the theory that

there’s just a little bit of technical stuff and a lot of garbage. This was as

much of a misconception in the days of 30 days of news as it is now.

That there was a little bit of technical stuff drowning in garbage. The

fact was even then, the technical stuff was quite a substantial slice of the

traffic. It’s just that individual people [only -ed] notice the little bits of

technical stuff that appeal to them.

Jay: And they call everything else garbage.

Henry: Or they just don’t think about the fact that there was a lot

more technical stuff.

Michael: If you don’t look for it you don’t see it to some extent.

Jay: But I thought Ronda’s question was slightly deeper in the

sense that she was asking: Was there something almost as profound

about the nontechnical stuff in terms of the kinds of things people talked

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about that influenced them to be better with the technical stuff?

Henry: Maybe, in small ways. The nontechnical stuff was the first

exposure a lot of these people had to an online community. Bulletin

board systems were not particularly widespread at the time. They did

exist, but they certainly hadn’t reached the current level of popularity.

Networks like the ARPAnet were much spoken of by the people who

belonged to them, but weren’t particularly widespread. And there may

have been some positive effect in helping to socialize people, so to

speak.

Ronda: You have talked a little bit about speed, a little bit about

performance. Maybe you can speak briefly about what the limits of ‘B

news’ were that you were dealing with, and how that influenced your

objectives with ‘C news.’

Henry: Well, our big problem, a contributing factor, was that ‘B

news’ was messy and buggy. There were things you couldn’t do with it.

There were things that didn’t work well on it. It clearly was less and less

able to cope with the growing volume of traffic. Even just things like

memory leaks. “Expire” wasn’t the only code that potentially had

memory leaks. It was just getting harder to deal with the stuff. The big

thing though was that ‘B news’ was very inefficient at handling

incoming traffic. It took a long time to process incoming traffic. It beat

on the machine pretty heavily, meanwhile. And there didn’t seem to be

any simple way to fix this. There were fundamental structural problems

that one really could not do anything about that limited the ability to

speed it up. We kicked around a bunch of ideas about improved ways of

storing news and so forth. Eventually, we concluded that there wasn’t

any big improvement to be had. Nothing that would be worth the trouble

of being incompatible. The main thing we were after was just greater

performance.

Ronda: Can you say who we is? Or if this went on online as well.

Henry: This is Geoff and me. [Geoff Collyer -ed] I’ve never been

a big believer in committee design. Our preference, me in particular, but

I think Geoff as well, our preference is to do something and then

announce it, rather than vice versa. Partly because we’ve got a higher

opinion of our own sense of good design than a whole lot of other

people.

Page 10

Ronda: Can you explain what you mean by good design?

Henry: We’re big on writing simple clean software that does one

thing and does it well, which is not what you get out of a committee

design. And in fact, this is one of the things we have occasionally taken

flack for. We make our own decisions on what does and doesn’t go into

‘C news.’ So we don’t particularly care if this makes us popular or not.

We’ve made a few mistakes along the way as well. But, it was our own

idea. We’ve modified our own ideas of how things were going to work

quite a bit along the way and stuff evolved to a considerable extent as

we wrote it. There were muddles that had never adequately been cleaned

up. As late as just before our alpha release, there were still three

different programs called “rnews” in various places in our stuff. And

when we were packaging things up to put together a release, I put my

foot down and insisted that there had to be one and only one “rnews.”

And so we found other names for a couple of things in a hurry. But it

evolved along the way. We had ideas of where we were going. But it

didn’t come full blown as a complete design. It couldn’t really. That

approach to doing things just doesn’t work in the real world. The stuff

always evolves. Once you start building up experience with the problem

and with your tentative solutions, the requirements always evolve. So

you really do have to plan for getting something working and having it

evolve from there.

Ronda: Interesting.

Henry: We put a lot of thought over time into the performance

issues and also into the precise definitions for a lot of things. The ‘B

news’ stuff - even its documentation - in crucial areas, just sort of waved

its hands and said, “well, you know what we mean.” In some cases, we

actually had to put quite a bit of effort into deciding exactly what should

be done in obscure situations. [These are -ed] things you find out by

doing it. It was not something that really could be predicted from

specification in advance.

Ronda: That’s interesting. Do you have a sense that the speed and

the performance have made possible the ability of ‘C news’ compared

to ‘B news’ to deal with volume?

Henry: People have adopted our stuff for a variety of reasons.

Particularly, after the word started getting out that it was generally

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better. There have been a few specific features that won us a lot of

converts. Something that went into our version of “expire” sort of

midway through its development process and won us a lot of friends,

was control over expiry newsgroup by newsgroup. The ‘B news’

“expire” basically just let you set expiry rules for all the news put

together. A lot of people, in fact, had different opinions about the value

of different newsgroups, and wanted to keep some things longer than

others. The fact that we could do that won us a lot of friends very

quickly. It probably wouldn’t have been that hard to add to ‘B news’, but

nobody ever thought of it. There were things like this, but ultimately,

people switched to ‘C news’ because ‘B news’ was eating their

machines alive, and they wanted some performance back. And for that

matter, because they could see the handwriting on the wall. There were

machines, including some of ours, where toward the end, ‘B news’ was

running essentially nonstop from 5:00 in the evening till 9:00 in the

morning, turned off during the day because it had too much of an impact

on performance when lots of people were trying to get real work done.

And it wasn’t keeping up with the incoming load. The backlog was

growing. People who ran into that kind of situation generally decided

real fast that they needed to switch to something else.

Jay: I thought Ronda’s question had another component. Can your

careful attention to speed and performance be pointed to as accounting

for the tremendous growth in Usenet that wouldn’t have been possible

with something with less performance.

Henry: The trend was very firmly established very early. But

certainly Usenet would have had a lot of trouble coping with growth if

‘C news’ hadn’t come along when it did.

Jay: What I am asking is if not as careful a version of ‘C news,’

would that have been a limit that would have...?

Henry: Probably, because the care and effort we put into perfor-

mance basically accounted for a lot of the performance. We were a little

disappointed, initially, in fact, that fixing some of the basic structural

mistakes of ‘B news’ didn’t improve performance more. Yes, it was

considerably better than ‘B news’, but it wasn’t as good as we expected.

The way you make stuff run really fast, it turns out, is to put a lot of

attention into making it run really fast. Avoiding basic mistakes is a

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crucial prerequisite, but it’s not enough by itself. To really make the

stuff perform, you really do have to put a lot of effort into understanding

what things hurt performance, where the time is going. You have to put

a fair bit of time into thinking about how things are being done and how

they might be done better. We got a certain amount of performance just

by careful low level tuning, looking for hot spots and finding ways to

speed up the code there. But we also got an awful lot by standing back

and thinking – “What is this code doing and is there a better way to do

it?” “Are we repeating things that we could do just once?” “Is there

information we need that we’re having to gather laboriously that could

just be stored centrally instead?” – and things like that, changes in stra-

tegy. Changes in strategy are what win you the big performance

improvements on the whole. Not overall strategy in the sense of the

mistakes ‘B news’ made versus the ones we didn’t make. But sort of

mid-level strategy - how the code does what it does. The way you get

big performance improvements is not to make a bit of code run a little

bit faster, but to take code out entirely. To find ways of just not doing

some things and still getting the overall job done. Reducing the amount

of time needed for something to 0 is always better than reducing it to

10%, though the 10% can be useful too.

Jay: But when the problems start building up now, will the next fix

not be a software fix?

Henry: To some extent, we’ve had hardware fixes coming in all

along. Faster modems, bigger disks, faster machines. And that’s

certainly helped. But it’s going to be hard to beat ‘C news’ performance

a lot without drastic revisions in something fundamental. There are

things we know of and are doing to make it faster yet. But huge

performance improvements are going to have to come from something

more fundamental. One thing that turns out to be relatively expensive is

just looking up a file name in an operating system, opening a file by

name. The name look-ups are costly, even in versions of UNIX that have

put some attention into optimizing them. And we know where our stuff

is doing file name look-ups and we just don’t do it any more than

necessary. Any major speed up in that area – that is still one of the major

bottlenecks – is going to have to come from major revisions to the

operating system. It’s not something that can be greased up much more

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at the user level.

Ronda: You said earlier that you used to be able to get a month of

Usenet and now you’re down to, I think you said, four days.

Henry: In our case, we’re storing 4 days, and using a great deal

more disk space for it, too.

Ronda: Does that mean that in fact the size has gotten to a point

where there is a need to figure out how to make some change? Is it

coming to that somehow?

Henry: People have been predicting the imminent death of the net

for a decade now, so I’m very reluctant to do that. But certainly, it’s

gotten to the point where we store 4 days because that’s basically

enough to carry you over a long weekend. If it drops much more than

that it’s going to be a serious problem for maintaining continuity in a lot

of discussions. You can mitigate it somewhat by getting bigger disks or

by being more selective about what you get. Probably, the bulk of

Usenet sites these days are somewhat selective. We used to be a major

redistribution point within Toronto. We’re still a minor one. Because of

that we try to carry everything. But carrying everything is steadily

getting more expensive.

Jay: But does that imply there’s going to have to be very large

central distributing points?

Henry: That’s already happening to some extent. A lot of big

universities and things like that, for example, now have central news

distribution machines, just to keep the load from spreading everywhere.

And, for example, most of the news distribution within U of T now is

handled by one of two central machines.

Jay: Yours not being one of them?

Henry: Ours not being one of them anymore. We do some

redistribution to places outside campus. Not a lot compared to what we

used to do. But that’s definitely happening. UUNET in the states is

another example. Someone once called it Usenet’s main sewage pump.

Ronda: What is it? Can you say what UUNET is?

Henry: It’s a site which offers mail connections and news-feeds for

money, basically. It has done wonders for the connectivity of the net

because a lot of people who couldn’t do this sort of thing on an informal

basis are happy to get a connection to UUNET which does cost money

Page 14

but is professionally maintained. They’re very much in the business of

processing mail and news for money. And they’re a very central point

now.

Ronda: Isn’t that also a little bit in contradiction with the way

Usenet originally started with it being available to people at a low cost

or no cost? But there’s also Freenets growing up. For example, the

Cleveland Freenet and the Youngstown Freenet and Ottawa is supposed

to be developing a Freenet in Canada [National Capital Freenet in

Ottawa and Victoria Freenet in Victoria are now online -ed]. The

Freenets are how I got access. I wouldn’t have been able to pay for

access and other people I know wouldn’t....

Henry: There’s always people willing to do a certain amount for

free. There’s always going to be a considerable amount of that. The

point is when you are in it for a long period of time and the demand just

seems to be growing, sooner or later you burn out the supply of

volunteer manpower. And somebody has got to start paying for it.

Ronda: And some of the contradiction is that it’s public money....

In fact the public is paying for it, so to then go and put a commercial

person in and charge back again, what we are already paying for in

public funds, it’s thru the universities and it’s thru the NSF....

Henry: The real problem on all of this comes when you start talk-

ing about unlimited growth. This is the problem Usenet has had all

along, in fact, which is, coping with continued growth. That shows up

in a number of ways. That’s just one side of it. Eventually a university,

for example, decides that too much of its phone bill is being spent on

shipping news around for other people and its time to let somebody do

this who is actually getting paid for the job. Because NSF in its

beneficence doesn’t supply unlimited amounts of money for such things,

sooner or later the demands get large enough that somebody’s got to put

up an appropriation specifically for it. And at that point, universities

have a tendency to bow out if they can’t get somebody nice to give them

money for it.

And Usenet has run into problems of growth in a lot of other forms.

Like the sort of social compact that regulates behavior to some extent on

the net. The problems of finding information when there are thousands

of newsgroups. All kinds of things like that. You regularly hear moans

Page 15

from people about how Usenet isn’t the way it used to be. And occasion-

ally some inconsiderate old timer will point out, “Well it never was.

You’re one of these beginners who only joined in 1986. You don’t know

the way the net started out.”

Michael: The question of growth also brings out the connections

through the Internet because that has grown a lot more than it was

initially.

Henry: Again, that’s been a saving grace to some extent because

the Internet has saved us from the pyramiding phone bills to a consider-

able extent. The bandwidth that has been made available in recent years

for the growth of the Internet, a noticeable fraction of that is shipping

Usenet traffic around. I don’t know about the Internet itself, but there

was a link between Toronto and Waterloo, the other prominent univer-

sity in Ontario. Five years ago or more, I saw a graph of traffic growth

over time. Generally, of course, it was upward. But there was this one

huge step more or less, in the traffic, and that was when we started

shipping Usenet stuff back and forth, that week. I expect that Usenet

would have undergone some sort of collapse or transformation by this

point if we had to go on shipping it by phone, because even with the

modems getting better and better, they weren’t getting better that fast,

by that much.

Ronda: We have to end the interview soon. So we just want to ask

a few final questions.

Michael: I was wondering if there was anything – with you, with

your experiences of being on the net and being one of the writers, one

of the programmers of ‘C news,’ and just your general knowledge – is

there anything that other people who were system administrators or who

were on the Usenet might find useful? Any insights?

Henry: Nothing very dramatic. About all I have to say is that a lot

of this stuff is harder than it looks. I really don’t know whether Geoff

and I would have gotten involved with ‘C news’ if we had realized

everything that was going to be involved because there was a lot more

programming than we thought and a lot more ongoing hassle than we

thought. If you decide to get into this kind of thing, you have to think

very, very carefully about the possible implications.

Ronda: Have there been rewards as well?

Page 16

Henry: For me, nothing enormously tangible. The occasional free dinner

and things like that. And Geoff is currently working full time on News

software support.

Ronda: But what about the principles that you clarified in the

papers that you have written? Has that been something? For example, in

“News Need Not Be Slow,” you and Geoff wrote, “In order to know

how to get somewhere, you must know where you are starting from.”

Are there principles like that that have come out of doing the work that

have been helpful?

Henry: There’s a lot of little things, things which can be useful to

know if you’re doing something like performance enhancement. But the

one general principle I could distill out of it is that: If you want to write

software that’s fast or portable or well structured, despite years of

evolution, you have to care about it and put effort into it. It’s easy to be

sloppy, but it comes back to haunt you. The only way to make some-

thing fast is to care about performance from the beginning and put real

effort into getting it. The only way to keep the code clean and maintain-

able is to constantly put effort into that aspect of it. Resist the temptation

to make quick fixes. Or if a quick fix just has to be done for some

reason, make a point of going back and doing it right. These things do

not happen automatically and they won’t happen if you don’t care about

them. The main reason why a lot of software today is bloated and

complicated and obscure and buggy is that people don’t care. They may

care in the sense that if you ask them they say, “Yes, we care,” but the

fact is they don’t put any effort into it. They don’t care enough to work

on it.

Michael: Does what you just said help figure out how to keep

Usenet running? Everyone says it’s loaded now with users and

newsgroups and messages? Is there any way to apply this?

Henry: Not really very directly. It’s a very different situation from

software. I can’t think of any particularly direct application other than

the very general application you have to think about what the real

underlying problems are. And avoid the temptation to settle for quick

fixes that don’t really solve the problem.

Page 17

The Tradition of May 1, 1848

Sir Francis Bacon

and the Shorter Hours Bill

May 1, 1848 is a special day in the history of the industrial world.

On May 1, 1848, the first 10 hour bill became law in Britain. This law

was the result of a tradition of applying the methods of science to the

problems of production, both social and technical.

To get technology to function, it has long been observed, one must

base one’s theories and plans on accurate knowledge of the physical

world. Over 300 years ago, in the 1600's, a group of amateur scientists

began meeting in London. These scientists were part of a tradition that

stretched back into Italy at the beginning of the Renaissance and was

perhaps best represented by Sir Francis Bacon [1561-1626] who

explained how science must base itself on accurate data and observa-

tions drawn from this data and that science must serve to benefit the

people of the society. “For we can’t command nature, except by obeying

her,” wrote Bacon. Interested in putting into practice the scientific

method and principles that Bacon had developed and in applying their

science to serve the well being of the British people, these amateur

scientists gathered in each others homes and then in Gresham College

in London, forming what came to be known as the Invisible College.

They gathered to conduct experiments in the different areas of produc-

tion and science.

A 22 stanza ballad which describes the activities of these amateur

scientists who met at Gresham College contains the following two

stanzas:

“If to be rich, and to be learned

Be every nations chiefest glory,

How much are Englishmen concerned

Gresham to celebrate in story

Who built th’ Exchange to enrich the City

And College founded the Witty”

Page 18

A second hath described at full

The Philosophy of making Cloth

Tells you, what Grass doth make course Wooll

And what it is that breeds the Moth

Great learning is ‘ith art of Clothing

Though vulgar People think it nothing.

(Taken from “in praise of the choice Company of Philosophers and Wits

who meet on Wednesday evening at Gresham College,” in “The

Economic Writings of Sir William Petty,” ed Charles Henry Hull, vol II,

Cambridge, 1899, p. 324)

In 1660, these amateur scientists formed the Royal Society of

London for the Improving of Natural Knowledge. One of those invited

to join was John Graunt, a London shopkeeper, even though the science

he pursued was different from the physical sciences that others in the

Royal Society practiced. When the British Government published a set

of data called the Bills of Mortality documenting how and why people

of London died, Graunt studied the data and formulated a set of

observations published as “Natural and Political Observations...made

upon the Bills of Mortality” by Capt. John Graunt. Graunt’s observa-

tions on the data gathered by the British government about the social and

physical conditions of the people of London, was scientific work

supported and recognized by the Royal Society, just as was exploration

into physical and technical phenomena.

The data gathered by the scientists of the Royal Society, and the

observations they made from their data, led to a significant increase in

the ability of Britain industry to increase production, a breakthrough that

made possible the industrial revolution.

However, the new machines and processes of production did not

serve the purpose intended. Workers in the factories using the new

machinery and methods of production worked longer hours and under

more dangerous conditions than other workers. Factory owners

commonly hired children at low wages and threw adult workers,

particularly men, out on the streets. Instead of the new mechanization

improving the material well being of the society, as the Royal Society

scientists had intended, the new production made Great Britain into a

Page 19

Factory Hell. Workers of all ages were required to work 12 or more

hours a day, six or seven days a week. The unguarded machinery

resulted in many deaths and injuries of workers, often of young children

who worked the machines. The low wages of the parents exerted pres-

sure on them to send their young children into the factories to work in

order to keep the family from starving.

Scientific advances in production in Britain were at a standstill.

These poor working conditions fettered the financial or social incentive

to improve the machinery or utilize further scientific breakthroughs.

Faced with this factory hell, the workers themselves determined that

there had to be a change. Though they didn’t have the right to vote for

representatives in Parliament, workers formed short time committees

and publicized the conditions in the factories. They found allies like

Robert Owen, a Mill owner from New Lanark, Scotland, who had

realized that long hours and dangerous working conditions interfered

with production.

By the early 1830s, the British Parliament was under pressure to do

an inquiry into the conditions of the Factory Hell. They sent out a set of

investigators to gather scientific data of the actual conditions existing in

the factories. They also were charged with investigating how the current

laws functioned and whether these laws were inadequate to prevent the

abuses that were occurring. As a result of the investigation, a report was

published. (See “Factory Inquiry Commission: First Report of... His

Majesty’s Commissioners... to collect information in the Manufacturing

Districts....,” Great Britain, June 28, 1833.)

A Ten Hours Act introduced in Parliament to limit the hours of

labor in the Mills of children and women (and thus of men as well), met

with vigorous opposition from a group of Factory owners and their

spokesmen in Parliament. They claimed that British industry would be

forced to shut down if there were interference from Parliament in the

relationship between capital and labor. Factory workers and their allies

continued their battle for a Ten Hours Law which would impose a

statutory limitation on working hours. (See, for example, articles in “The

Ten Hours Advocate,” 1846-1847 documenting the strikes, demon-

strations and support among factory workers for the Ten Hours Bill, the

arguments in favor of the bill, and the efforts of employers and their

Page 20

parliamentary spokesmen against the bill.) As a result of the accurate

documentation of the hellish conditions and the determined battle

against the employers wanting to continue the status quo, the Factory

Act was passed by Parliament, limiting the hours of work, and establish-

ing education requirements for children. It went into effect on May 1,

1848.

Despite the passage of the law, employers continued their opposi-

tion. After a continued battle, a 10-1/2 hour law with some enforcement

power went into effect in 1850 and finally established the principle of

government intervention in the relations between labor and capital.

As a result of the passage of the 10-1/2 hours bill, British industry

enjoyed great health and productivity and there was a remarkable

stimulus to the economy. Describing the results of the Shorter Hours

law, a British Factory inspector wrote, “The great improvements made

in machines of every kind have raised their productive power very

much. Without a doubt the shortening of the hours of labor... gave

impulse to these improvements. (Frankfurter Brief, p. 763) Another

commentator explained, “There is more work done now in ten hours and

a half in the factories in England than ever was in twelve or fourteen.”

(ibid., p. 762) This was the first significant factory legislation of the

industrialized world. The law limiting work in the factory to 10-1/2

hours and requiring that children have mandated hours of education also

influenced American factory legislation which was modeled on the

results of the British experience. But what is considered the most

convincing evidence of the success of the shorter hours law is how

former opponents of the law were forced to recant and criticize their

own mistakes. The “Report of the New York Bureau of Labor Statis-

tics,” in 1900, describes how members of the Parliament, Roebuck and

Graham publicly admitted their changed positions. The Report explains:

“It came to pass that in 1860, when a bill was introduced to extend

the ten-hour law to other branches of the textile industry, J. A. Roebuck,

who had originally opposed with bitterness this kind of legislation, made

the following recantation:

‘I am about to speak on this question under somewhat peculiar

circumstances. Very early in my parliamentary career Lord Ashley, now

the Earl of Shaftesbury, introduced a bill of this description. I, being an

Page 21

ardent political economist, as I am now, opposed the measure,... and was

very much influenced in my opposition by what the gentlemen of

Lancashire [the Mill owners -ed] said. They declared that it was the last

half-hour of the work performed by their operatives which made all their

profits, and that if we took away that last half-hour we should ruin the

manufactures of England. I listened to that statement and trembled for

the manufacturers of England [a laugh]; but Lord Ashley persevered.

Parliament passed the bill which he brought in. From that time down to

the present, the factories of this country have been under State control,

and I appeal to this House whether the manufacturers of England have

suffered by this legislation.’” (p. 50) (Brief, p. 485-6)

A second opponent of the Ten Hours bill added his testimony to that

of Roebuck’s. Sir James Graham admitted: “I am sorry once more to be

involved in a short-time discussion. I have, however, a confession to

make to the House.... Experience has shown to my satisfaction that many

of the predictions formerly made against the factory bill have not been

verified by the result.... By the vote I shall give tonight, I will endeavor

to make some amends for the course I pursued in earlier life in opposing

the factory bill.” (p. 51) (Brief, p. 486)

Describing the lesson later drawn from this battle, the Frankfurter

Brief in favor of an 8 hour law in Oregon, quotes from the British Lord

Morley, “Can the realities between labor and capital be safely left to the

unfettered play of individual competition? The answer of modern states-

manship is, that unfettered individual competition is not a principle to

which the regulation of industry may be entrusted.” (from Morley’s

Cobden, pg. 297-298)

The Ten Hours Victory of May 1, 1848, was a demonstration that

when the principles of science are applied to the working conditions of

the producers, there is a basis to solve those problems. The passage of

the Factory Act of 1848 was the acknowledgment of the principle that

unbridled competition of the market was not a useful guide in the

relations between labor and capital. Thus in honor of the 145

anniver-

sary of May 1, 1848, it is helpful to remember the tradition of the Ten

Hours Advocates and renew the battle for shorter hours of labor so that

the fruits of the new technology will improve the lives of the workers

who have made such technology possible.

Page 22

The Social Forces Behind the

Development of Usenet News

by Michael Hauben

[email protected]

Right at this moment someplace in the world, someone is being

helpful (or someone is being helped.) At the same time, others are

participating in various discussions and debates. A new communications

medium is currently in its infancy. Over the past two decades the global

computer telecommunications network has been developing. One

element of this network is called Usenet News (also known as

NetNews), and this news’ original carrier was called UUCPnet (or just

UUCP). The rawest principle of Usenet News is its importance. In its

simplest form, Usenet News represents democracy. The basic element

of Usenet News is a post. Each individual post consists of a unique

contribution from some user placed in a subject area, called a

newsgroup. In Usenet’s very beginning (and still to some extent today)

posts were transferred using UNIX’s UUCP utility. This utility allows

the use of phone lines to transmit computer data among separate

computers. The network (UUCPnet) that Usenet News was transferred

on, grew from the ground up in a grassroots manner. Originally, there

was no official structure. What began as two or three sites on the

network in 1979 expanded to 15 in 1980. From 150 in 1981 to 400 in

1982. The very nature of Usenet is communication. Usenet News greatly

facilitates inter-human communication among a large group of users.

Inherent in most mass media is central control of content. Many

people are influenced by the decisions of a few. Television program-

ming, for example, is controlled by a small group of people compared

to the size of the audience. In this way, the audience has very little

choice over what is emphasized by most mass media. However, Usenet

News is controlled by its audience. Usenet News should be seen as a

promising successor to other people’s presses, such as The Searchlight,

Page 23

The Appeal to Reason, The Jewish Daily Forward in the U.S. and the

Penny Press tradition in England. Like these other people’s presses,

most of the material written to Usenet is by the same people who

actively read Usenet. Thus, the audience of Usenet decides the content

and subject matter to be thought about, presented and debated. The ideas

that exist on Usenet come from the mass of people who participate in it.

In this way, Usenet is an uncensored forum for debate – where many

sides of an issue come into view. Instead of being force-fed by an

uncontrollable source of information, people set the tone and emphasis

on Usenet. People control what happens on Usenet. In this rare situation,

issues and concerns that are of interest and thus important to the

participants, are brought up. In the tradition of Amateur Radio and

Citizen’s Band Radio, Usenet News is the product of the users’ ideas

and will. Unlike Amateur Radio and CB, however, Usenet is owned and

controlled solely by the participants. Currently the range of connectivity

is international and quickly expanding around the world into every nook

and cranny. This explosive expansion allows growing communication

with people around the world.

In the 1960s, the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) of

the Department of Defense began research of fundamental importance

to the development and testing of computer communications networks.

ARPA research laid the ground work for the development of other

networks such as UUCPnet. ARPA conducted an experiment in

attempting to connect incompatible mainframe computers.

It was called

the ARPA Computer Network (ARPAnet). ARPA’s stated objectives

were:

“1) To develop techniques and obtain experience on inter-connect-

ing computers in such a way that a very broad class of interactions were

possible and

2) To improve and increase computer research productivity through

resource sharing.”

ARPA was both conducting communications research and trying to

study how to conserve funds by avoiding duplication of computer

resources.

A Cambridge, Mass. company, Bolt Beranek and Newman,

Inc. (BBN), was chosen to construct the network, and AT&T was chosen

to provide the communications lines. ARPAnet was needed because it

Page 24

was found that a data connection over existing telephone voice lines was

too slow and not reliable enough in order to have a useful connection.

Packet-switching was developed for use as the protocol of exchanging

information over the lines. Packet-switching is a communications

process in which all messages are broken up into equal size packets

which are transmitted interspersed and then re-assembled. In this way,

short, medium and long messages get transferred with minimum delay.

The ARPAnet was a success. ARPA provided several advances to

communications research. ARPAnet researchers were surprised at the

enthusiastic adoption of electronic mail (e-mail) as the primary source

of communication early on. E-mail was a source of major productivity

increase through the use of the ARPAnet.

By 1983, the ARPAnet

officially shifted from using NCP (Network Control Program) to TCP/IP

(Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol.) A key point to

TCP/IP’s success is in its simplicity. It is very easy to implement over

various platforms, and this simplicity has accounted for its continued

existence as a de facto standard of the Internet up to today. ARPAnet’s

lasting contribution was demonstrating how a backbone infrastructure

can serve as a connection between gateways. A gateway is a computer

or part of a computer programmed to receive messages from one

network and transfer them onto another network.

ARPAnet grew quickly to more than 50 nodes between Hawaii and

Norway.

However, it did not extend to all who could utilize it.

Computer scientists at universities without Department of Defense

contracts noticed the advantages and petitioned the National Science

Foundation (NSF) for similar connectivity. CSnet was formed to service

computer scientists. CSnet was initially financed by the NSF. Very

quickly the desire for interconnection spread to other members of the

university community and CSnet grew to serve more scientists than just

computer scientists at universities. CSnet became known as “Computer

‘and’ Science Network” rather than just “Computer Science network.”

ARPAnet was phased out by the Department of Defense, and was

replaced by various internal networks (such as MILnet). The role of

connecting university communities and regional networks was taken

over by an NSF funded NSFnet, which originated as a connection for

university researchers to the five National Supercomputer Centers.

Page 25

CSnet and NSFnet were made possible by the research on ARPAnet.

The NSFnet became the U.S. backbone for the global network now

known as the Internet.

ARPAnet research was pioneering for communications research.

Researchers discovered the link between computer inter-connection and

increased productivity from human communication. The sharing of

resources was proven to save money and increase computer use and

productivity. The development of packet-switching revolutionized the

basic methodology of connecting computers. The source of these

discoveries were the people involved. The personnel involved in the

ARPAnet project were very intelligent and forward-looking. They

recognized their position of developing future technologies, and thus did

not develop products that commercial industry could (and would)

develop. Instead they understood that the communications technologies

they were developing had to come from a not-for-profit body. ARPA

researchers had no proprietary products to support, and no deadlines to

meet. Either would have tainted, or made developing networks of

incompatible computers impossible or limited. Current users of

international computer networks are in debt to the pioneers of ARPAnet.

So ARPAnet was successful in its attempt to connect various

spatially remote computers, and thus more importantly the people who

used those computers. However, these people were either professors at

Universities that had Department of Defense research grants or

employees of a limited number of Defense Industry companies.

Eventually other Universities connected through CSnet, NSFnet, BITnet

and other developing connections. There were still a mass of people who

wanted a connection, but were not in a position to gain one. Duke

University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill were two

such locations. It was in these underprivileged fertile grounds where the

grassroots computer communications breakthrough of Usenet originated

and developed.

The UNIX operating system provides the basic tools needed to

share information between computers. UNIX

was developed as “a

system around which a fellowship would form.”

One of the program-

mers of UNIX, Dennis Ritchie, wrote that the intended purpose of UNIX

was to “encourage close communication.”

UNIX’s general principles

Page 26

thus conceptually foreshadowed the basic tenet of Usenet News. How

else should one go about designing communications programs, but on

an operating system which was designed with a basic principle of

encouraging communication? The UNIX utility UUCP (UNIX-to-UNIX

CoPy) was developed in 1976 by Mike Lesk at Bell Labs. UUCP

provided a simple way of passing files between any two computers

running UNIX and UUCP. UNIX’s popularity also arose from AT&T’s

prohibition to profit from other than their main business, phone services,

under the terms of the 1956 Consent Decree. UNIX was thus available

on a “no-cost” (or very low cost) basis. The operating system was seen

as an “in-house” tool on DEC computers and was in use throughout Bell

Labs. Many Universities used the same type of computer and were

licensed by AT&T to utilize UNIX. It was thus easily accessible.

Schools picked it up, and computer science students used it to learn

about operating systems, as UNIX was a model of elegance and

simplicity compared to most operating systems of the times. UNIX

became a widely used operating system in the academic world. This

paved the way for an international public communications system to

form.

Usenet News was created by graduate students Tom Truscott and

James Ellis of Duke University in conjunction with graduate student

Steve Bellovin of the University of North Carolina in 1979. A 5-page

leaflet introducing Usenet News was distributed at the Winter 1980

USENIX UNIX Users’ Conference in Boulder, CO. Later that year, at

the Summer USENIX Conference in Delaware the software needed to

participate in Usenet was put on the Conference tape. By this time,

Stephen Daniel had rewritten the basic programs and it was called A-

News. The software was immensely popular.

Usenet was patterned to mean “UNIX Users Network.” The

developers thought Usenet would be used to discuss people’s problems

and to share experiences about UNIX. Usenet did provide a forum for

people to solve problems with UNIX, as AT&T provided no support for

UNIX. In an early handout, Usenet is referred to as a “poor man’s

ARPAnet.”

Stephen Daniel told me that people who didn’t have access

to the ARPAnet were hungry for similar opportunities to communicate.

Usenet News has been full of surprises from the beginning. The

Page 27

originators of Usenet News underestimated the hunger of the people. As

the initial intentions were to produce an easy method of communicating

with other users at the same site, the writers thought people would want

to have local bulletin boards.

However, people were attracted by the

possibility of communicating with others outside the local community.

Even today, the wide-spread communication is part of what makes

Usenet so enticing. It was also thought NetNews would be useful as a

method of communications at individual locations, and between sites

close to each other.

Usenet grew as a grassroots connection of people.

The people who utilized NetNews wanted to communicate, and

communicate they did! People have a fundamental need to communicate

and Usenet News aptly fills the bill. (See, e.g., Gregory G. Woodbury’s

“Net Cultural Assumptions”)

Early in 1980 or 1981 the gap between ARPAnet and Usenet was

bridged.

The University of California at Berkeley had connections to

both ARPAnet and Usenet News. This allowed another pioneer, Mark

Horton, to bring discussions from ARPAnet mailing lists into Usenet

newsgroups.

This was a significant achievement. Communities other

than ARPA sponsored researchers were finally able to see what the

ARPAnet had made possible. The gatewaying of ARPAnet mailing lists

into Usenet attracted a wave of people. These people became attracted

to Usenet News when two ARPAnet mailing lists (SF-LOVERS and

HUMAN-NETS) began to appear on Usenet.

These lists provided

interesting material and discussions. The size of the news feed (i.e., the

raw data of Usenet News) thus became larger and provided more for

people to read. Later other sites would serve as gateways to even more

discussion lists from the ARPAnet. NetNews was also seen as a superior

method of holding discussions. Gatewaying these fa (i.e., From

ARPAnet) newsgroups proved to be politically courageous. The

ARPAnet was only accessible by a certain group of people, and these

gateways challenged that notion. The effect on the ARPAnet was

important as Steve Bellovin wrote:

“The impact of Usenet on the ARPAnet was more as a (strong)

catalyst to force re-examination (and benign neglect) on the strict

policies against interconnection. Uucp mail into the ARPAnet became

a major force long before it was legit. And it was obviously known to,

Page 28

and ignored by, many of the Powers that Were.”

The network made possible by UUCP expanded to connect people

across the entire country. Rather early UUCP expanded internationally

when the University of Toronto Zoology Department joined the Net in

May of 1981.

Two companies proved helpful to this communication

by distributing NetNews and electronic mail long distance. Each UUCP

site had to either pay the phone bill to connect to the next system, or

arrange for the other system to make the phone call. System Administra-

tors at AT&T and DEC did the footwork in order to take e-mail and

news where it might not have reached. These people went through the

trouble in order to try to see the system work. However easy connections

were not always available. In one example, Case Western Reserve

University graduate students had to route mail across the continent twice

in order to send mail through UUCP to reach their professors who were

connected to the ARPAnet next door.

Usenet News seems to have

introduced the idea of connectivity to the ARPAnet, as gradually the

ARPAnet connected to other networks until it became more known as

a backbone to other networks than a self-contained network.

Voluntary effort is the crucial foundation of UUCPnet and Usenet

News. On one side, there are those who donate time and energy by

contributing to Usenet’s content – writing messages and answering

messages or participating in a debate. Without the time and effort put in

by the users of Usenet News, Usenet News would not be what it is

today. Also important to Usenet’s success are the system administrators

who make the running of Usenet News possible. Resource-wise,

NetNews takes up disk space on computers throughout the Usenet, and

phone calls often must be made to transfer the raw data of the news. In

particular, system administrators at AT&T and DEC found it worthwhile

to transport the News across the country. Certain sites emerged as

clearing houses for Usenet News and UUCP e-mail.

These machines

served as major relay stations of both news and e-mail. A structure grew

that was considered the “backbone” of “the net.” Backbone sites formed

the trunk of the circulatory system of news and e-mail. A backbone site

would connect to other central distribution computers and to numerous

smaller sites. These central backbone sites provided a crucial organiza-

tion to the Usenet communications skeleton. People formed the center

Page 29

of these connections. For example, ihnp4 at AT&T existed mainly

because of Gary Murakami’s effort and only partially from management

support. Usenet services and support were not officially part of Gary’s

job description. After Gary left ihnp4, Doug Price put time and effort to

keep things running smoothly. Certain System Administrators in

Universities also picked up the responsibility for distributing News and

e-mail widely. Often these individuals would find ways of having their

site pick up the phone bill. Sometimes sites would bill the recipients.

However, others who received a free-connection often exchanged that

for spreading what they received to others for no charge (e.g.; Greg

Woodbury & wolves off of Duke, and plenty of others.)

Initially, expansion of sites receiving Usenet News was slow. Some

statistics are shown in the table.

Year # of Sites Articles/day

1979 3 2

1980 15 10

1981 150 20

1982 400 50*

1983 600 120

1984 900 225

1985 1300 375 1MB+/day

1986 2500 500 2MB+/day

1987 5000 1000 2.5MB+/day

1988 11000 1800 4MB+/day

*This was after ARPAnet mailing lists were gatewayed into Usenet.

(Gene Spafford, Usenet History Archives from the Mailing List) [from

Gene Spafford, Oct. 11, 1990, based on presentation on Oct 1, 1988 for

the IETF meeting.]

Why did this happen? Initially Usenet was only transported via

UUCP connections. Besides UUCP, other resources were used, such as

weekly airmailing of mag-tape data to Australia to provide

connectivity.

Today, Usenet News travels over all types of connec-

tions. The evolving ARPAnet (and now the Internet) provided a faster

way of transporting news. However, a large number of Usenet News

Page 30

recipients only have connectivity via UUCP. Universities and certain

businesses can afford to connect to the Internet, but many individuals

also want a connection. Today 60% of Usenet traffic is carried over the

Internet via the instantaneous Network News Transport Protocol

(NNTP), but 40% of Usenet News is still carried through the slower

UUCP connections. From my own research using Usenet News, I have

heard of several examples of various types of connections using UUCP.

These representatives of the “fringe” give a clue to what the origins of

this communication must have been like.

The number of sites receiving Usenet News continually increased

(as already illustrated) and this clearly demonstrates its popularity.

People were attracted to Usenet News because of what it made possible.

People want to communicate and enjoy the thrill of finding others across

the country (or today across the world) who share a common interest or

just to be in touch with. Besides the common thrill, it is possible to make

a serious relationship. Usenet News makes this discovery possible

because it is a public forum. People expose their ideas broadly. This

wide exposure makes it possible to find compatriots in thought. The

same physical connections which carry Usenet News often also transport

electronic mail. Interactions and discoveries are only made possible by

the public aspect of Usenet News. Mailing Lists have as wide a range of

discussions, but are exposed to a much smaller sized group. The appeal

of Usenet can become tiresome at times,

but it is rare that anyone

leaves Usenet permanently. Unless, of course, someone can’t find the

time to fit Usenet into his or her life. As more universities, businesses,

and individuals connect, the value of Usenet News grows. Each new

person eventually can add his unique opinion to the collection of

thoughts that Usenet already has. Each new connection also increases

the area where new connections can be made through cheap local phone

calls. The potential for inexpensive expansion is limited only by the

oceans and other natural barriers.

ARPAnet has been supplemented and eventually replaced by

networks like CSnet and its successor NSFnet. Both were created by the

United States Government in response to research scientists’ and

professors’ pleas to have a similar connection to the ARPAnet. The

NSFnet was also created to provide access to the five supercomputer

Page 31

computing centers around the country. And now NSFnet as the

backbone of the global provides another route for Usenet News to be

distributed. Similar to the ARPAnet, NSFnet is a constant connection

run over leased lines. NetNews is distributed using the NNTP protocol

over Internet connections. This allows for News and e-mail to be

distributed quickly over a large area. Internet connections also assist in

carrying news and mail internationally. The Internet-class networks and

connections include the established government and university spon-

sored connections. However much of the way individuals are connected

at home is through the phone lines and various versions of UUCP. There

are also commercial services that exist now for a fee that serve to

provide connections for electronic mail and Usenet News access, as well

as access to the Internet.

Much of the development of Usenet News owes a big thanks to

restrictions on commercial uses. Where else in our society is the

commercial element so clearly separated from any entity? Many other

forums of discussion and communication become clogged and congested

when advertisements use space. On UUCPnet, people feel it wrong to

assist any commercial venture through the voluntary actions of those

who use and redistribute news and e-mail. When people feel someone

is abusing the nature of Usenet News, they let the offender know

through e-mail. In this manner users keep Usenet News as a forum that

is free from the monetary benefit for any one individual. Usenet is not

allowed to be a profit making venture for any one individual or group.

Rather, people fight to keep it a resource that is helpful to the society as

a whole.

On what was the ARPAnet and what is now the NSFnet and the

Internet, there are Acceptable Use Policies (AUP) that exist because

these networks were initially set up, founded and financed by public

monies. On these networks, commercial usage is prohibited, which

means it is also discouraged on other networks that gateway into the

NSFnet. [Unfortunately, the NSF is now encouraging privatization of the

NSF backbone. See e.g. the U.S. Office of Inspector General’s Report on

NSFnet, April, 1993 -ed] However, the discouragement of commercial

usage of the global Usenet News is separate and developed differently

from the AUP.

Page 32

The social network that Usenet News represents supersedes the

physical connection it rides on. The current NetNews rides on many of

the physical networks that exist today. However, if need would ever be,

Usenet could re-establish itself outside of the current physically

organized networks. Usenet News’ quality is such that it will survive

because of its users will. As a peer to peer network, Usenet draws its

importance. People who use Usenet News wish to communicate with

others. This communal wish means that people on Usenet find it in their

own and in the community’s interest to be helpful. In this way, Usenet

exists as a world-wide community of resources ready to be shared.

Where else today is there so much knowledge that is freely available?

Usenet News represents a living library. Usenet News is only a part of

the worldwide computer networks that are “part of the largest machine

that man has ever constructed – the global telecommunications net-

work.”

Usenet News began with the spirit that still exists today. On several

newsgroups I posted a message with the following subject: “I want to

hear from the four corners of the Net – That means YOU!” In return I

received numerous wonderful answers. One new pioneer was going to

use packet radio to send e-mail up to the CIS’s orbiting Mir Space

Station in the heavens. One person criticized Japan’s lack of understand-

ing the computer technology they supposedly “lead.” Another user from

France told me how the government charged a lot of money to access e-

mail and Usenet News, and how there were at least two other “unoffi-

cial” connections. Since the government didn’t recognize these other

gateways, e-mail was to be sent via the United States in order to reach

others across the street! Certain cities (e.g., Wellington, New Zealand

and Cleveland, Ohio) have free public connections to Usenet News, e-

mail and other network resources. Others in Krakow in Poland, Australia

and the ex-USSR sent me information about their connection. Some told

me of how they made other connections possible. One user in South

Africa told me how he distributed news and e-mail and was trying to

gain access to a satellite in order to set connections up with the interior

of Africa that lacks the otherwise needed infrastructure. The world is

still in the infancy of this communications inter-connectivity!

The very nature of Usenet News promotes change. Usenet News

Page 33

was born outside of established “networks,” and transcends any one

physical network. Currently, at this time, it exists of itself and via other

networks. It makes possible the distribution of information that might

otherwise not be heard through “official channels.” This role makes

Usenet News a herald for social change. Because of the inherent will to

communicate, people who don’t have access to News will want access

when they become exposed to what it is, and people who currently have

access will want News to expand its reach so as to further even more

communication. Usenet News might grow to provide a forum for people

to influence their governments. News allows for the discussion and

debate of issues in a mode that facilitates a mass participation. This

becomes a source of independent information. An independent source

is helpful in the search for the truth.

Administrators and individuals who handle the flow of information

have been predicting the “imminent death of the net” since 1982.

The

software that handles the distribution of NetNews has gone through

several versions to handle the ever increasing amount of information.

People who receive News have either had to decrease 1) the number of

days individual messages stay at the site, 2) the number of newsgroups

they receive; or they have had to allocate more disk space for the storage

of News. Despite all the predictions and worries, people’s desire for this

communication have kept this social network floating. Brad Templeton

once wrote, “If there is a gigabit network with bandwidth to spare that

is willing to carry Usenet, it has plenty more growth left.”

Brad, and

everyone else will be happy to know that such a network does exist!

Various research labs (including the NSF Center for Telecommunica-

tions Research at Columbia University in New York) are close to

producing usable gigabit networks.

Usenet News is a democratic and technological breakthrough. The

computer networks and Usenet News are still developing. People need

to work towards keeping connections available and fairly inexpensive,

if not free, so as to encourage the body of users to grow. There are

several cities and governments across the world where the public has

access to network services as a civic service. This direction is to be

encouraged. Exclusive arrangements for access are to be discouraged.

The very nature of Usenet News means people are going to be working

Page 34

for its expansion. Others will be working for the expansion for their own

gain, and I wouldn’t doubt that some forces will be an active force

against expansion of Usenet. I can only ask that people attempt to spread

this document in an attempt to popularize and encourage the use and

fight for Usenet News.

Footnotes

1. “In September 1969, the embryonic one-node(!) ARPAnet came to life when the first

packet-switching computer was connected to the Sigma 7 computer at UCLA. Shortly

thereafter began the interconnection of many main processors (referred to as HOSTs)

at various university, industrial, and government research centers across the United

States.” (Kleinrock, “On Communications and Networks,” IEEE Transactions on

Computers, vol. C-25 No 12, Dec 1976, Pg. 1328)

2. F. Heart, A. McKenzie, J. McQuillan, and D. Walden, ARPAnet Completion Report,

Washington, 1978, pg. II-2

3. Alexander McKenzie et al, “ARPAnet, the Defense Data Network, and Internet” in

The Froehlich/Kent Encyclopedia of Telecommunications, vol. 1, pg. 346

4. Lawrence G. Roberts, The ARPAnet and Computer Networks, pg.145

5. Leonard Kleinrock, “On Communications and Networks,” IEEE Transactions on

Computers, vol C-25, No. 12, December, 1976, pg. 1327.

6. Alexander McKenzie, pg. 357

7. F. Heart, pg. ii-25

8. Alexander McKenzie, pg. 369

9. “For many of the people in government, at the major contractors, and in the

participating universities and research centers the development of the ARPAnet has

been an exciting time which will rank as a high point in their professional careers. In

1969 the ARPAnet project represented a high risk, potentially high impact research

effort. The existence of the net in practical useful form has not only provided

communications technology to meet any short term needs, but it represents a

Page 35

formidable communications technology and experience base on which the Defense

Department as well as the entire public and private sectors will depend for advanced

communications needs. The strong and diverse experience base generated by the

ARPAnet project has placed this country ahead of all others in advanced digital

communications science and technology.” (ARPAnet Completion Report, section II

-109.)

10. UNIX was born in 1969, the same year as ARPAnet.

11. D. M. Ritchie, “The UNIX System: The Evolution of the UNIX Time-sharing

System,” Bell Systems Technical Journal, vol. 63, No. 8 (October 1984), pg. 1578.

12. ibid.

13. Stephen Daniel, James Ellis, and Tom Truscott, “USENET – A General Access

UNIX Network,” Duke University, Durham, NC, Summer 1980.

14. Stephen Daniel, 1992, Personal Communications, November 1992.

15. Bellovin, Steve. M. and Mark Horton, “USENET – A Distributed Decentralized

News System,” an unpublished manuscript, 1985.

16. ibid.

17. KEY POINT - The first gateway of ARPAnet mailing lists to Usenet was an early

force to have gateways with ARPAnet. Gateways to ARPAnet were on the side and in

all likelihood not officially sanctioned. However, this provided the impetus for future

gateways into ARPAnet. This was the first pressure on the ARPAnet to provide service

to a larger number of people - a first step to transforming of the ARPAnet to become

a part of the backbone on the Internet.

18. Comment from Steve Bellovin, Oct. 10, 1990, Usenet History Archive: “Correct.

The original concept was that most of the traffic would be the form now known as

UNIX-wizards (or whatever it’s called this week). Growth was slow until Mark started

feeding the mailing lists in because there was nothing to offer prospective customers.

Given a ready source of material, people were attracted.”

19. Comment from Tom Truscott, Sept 25, 1990, Usenet History Archive: “The very

first news groups were “NET.” and local groups such as “dept.” Later Horton et al.

oversaw the lower-casing of NET. Only when ucbvax joined the net did “fa” appear.

Indeed I was unaware of the ARPAnet mailing lists such as human-nets until ucbvax

enlightened us.”

Page 36

20. Steve Bellovin, Oct 10, 1990 - Usenet History Mailing List. Also - from Lauren

Weinstein, Nov. 23, 1992: “Greetings. It’s all too easy to forget, even for those of us

who were there all along, how “small” it all started. When I was at UCLA-ATS

(ARPAnet site 1) in the early 1970s, even small mailing lists could cause concern. I

still distinctly remember the concerns regarding network loading from Geoff

Goodfellow’s NETWORK-HACKERS mailing list (this was in the days when “hacker”

didn’t have the negative meaning it has picked up since then) as the list passed *100*

addresses. A list about wine (WINE-TASTERS, I believe it was called) which was

mentioned in “Datamation” magazine caused memos to be sent out from the powers-

that-be about “official use” of the net. There was also a lot of hand-wringing about the

255 site limit (that is, a limit on the number of IMPs [Interface Message Processors -

ed]) in the network topology under NCP [Network Control Program -ed]. It’s quite

remarkable how much we accomplished on what by today’s standards were slow

machines with “tiny” amounts of memory, running with a 56 Kbit network backbone!”

21. Henry Spencer - Usenet History Archives “history” file.

22. From Amanda Walker, Tue, Oct. 16, 09:11 PDT, 1990, Usenet History Archives:

“Indeed. I suspect that there are any number of examples of this, but the most egregious

in my experience was at CWRU. The ECMP department had a VAX 11/780 on Usenet

(“cwruecmp”), and the campus computer center had a DEC-20 in the room next door.

The machines were separated by a grand total of about 30 feet and a piece of wallboard,

but the computer center was not at all interested in “catering” to “those CS types” by

stringing an RS-232 line between them. So, it was possible to send mail between them,

but only by sending via a route resembling:

crwuecmp => decvax => ucbvax (UUCP)

ucbvax => columbia (CU20A, I think)

(ARPAnet)

columbia => cmu-cs-c => cwru20

(CCnet)

Yup, that’s three networks, and two coasts just to get through a piece of sheetrock

:-). Took about a week, too.”

23. Alexander McKenzie, “Indeed, during a typical measurement period in June 1988,

over 50% of the active ARPAnet hosts were gateways, and they accounted for over

80% of the traffic.” pg. 369

24. At AT&T, the computers “research,” then “allegra,” then “ihnp4" served as major

mail and/or news distribution sites. At DEC - “decvax” gradually increased its role

(e.g., “decvax” in New Hampshire would call long distance to San Diego across the

country.)

25. Andrew Tabenbaum is quoted as saying something similar to “Never underestimate

Page 37

the bandwidth of a station wagon full of 9 track tape (or magnetic tape).”

26. “Flame Wars” (highly emotional attacks) can become annoying. There are ebbs and

flows of interesting posts. Even though Usenet is addicting, it can also be overwhelm-

ing.

27. Ithiel de Sola Pool, Technologies Without Boundaries, Cambridge 1990, pg. 56.

28. From the Usenet History Archives.

29. From the “posthist” file from Usenet History Archives.

Bibliography

Special Thanks to Bruce Jones for establishing and archiving the Usenet History

Archives. Also thanks to the Pioneers for getting Usenet News off to the right start.

Usenet History Archives are accessible via anonymous FTP at weber.ucsd.edu in the

directory /pub/usenet.hist

Bellovin, Steve M. and Mark Horton, “USENET – A Distributed Decentralized News

System,” an unpublished manuscript, 1985.

Heart, F., A. McKenzie, J. McQuillan, and D. Walden, ARPAnet Completion Report,

Washington, 1978,

Kleinrock, Leonard, “On Communications and Networks,” in IEEE Transactions on

Computers, vol C-25, No. 12, December, 1976, pg. 1326-1335.

McKenzie, Alexander and David C. Walden, “ARPAnet, the Defense Data Network,

and Internet,” in the Froehlich/Kent Encyclopedia, vol 1, pg. 341-376.

Ritchie, D. M., “The UNIX System: The Evolution of the UNIX Time-sharing

System,” Bell Systems Technical Journal, vol. 63, No. 8 (October 1984), pg. 1577--

1593.

Roberts, Lawrence G, “The Arpanet and Computer Networks,” in A History of

Personal Workstations, ed. Adele Goldberg, N.Y., 1988.

Page 38

The Net and the

Labor Movement

Editorial

This issue of the Amateur Computerist contains articles on the

victory of the Ten Hours Bill in England in May, 1848 and on the

development of the computer network that now spans the globe. The

Amateur Computerist has occasionally been asked why we combine

labor concerns with articles involving the newly developing computer

technology. The articles in this issue, hopefully, will help answer that

question.

The current global computer network is the development of work

done by scientists, engineers, programmers and many other networking

pioneers who functioned much in a tradition like that of the amateur

scientists who founded the Royal Society in London in the 1660s. [See

Sir Francis Bacon and the Shorter Hours Bill.] The ARPAnet was the

network developed to give computer scientists and other DOD contrac-

tors a way to test their networking theories. [See Social Forces Behind

the Net.] Based on the actual network to help them to collaborate and to

give them a workshop to test their theory and make it more attuned to

the real problems of a worldwide network, a global network evolved

which amazed even the pioneers themselves.

An environment like that of the Royal Society was also created at

Bell Labs where computer programmers involved in scientific research

like Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Doug McIlroy, Mike Lesk and

others worked to create a computer operating system that would make

it possible for computers to be utilized to the fullest by programmers.

They functioned together, helping each other and building on each

others’ inventions and discoveries. Due to a tradition of honestly

admitting their errors and mistaken models and their willingness to make

the bugs public that they found in their programs, they were able to

create an operating system that has spread round the world and has made

possible programming achievements like ‘C news’ for Usenet News.

The traditions of openness about errors, a scientific approach to

Page 39

searching out the real problems and simplicities and dealing with them,

and testing one’s theories in practice, have made it possible for Bell

Labs research programmers to create UNIX, for the ARPAnet computer

pioneers to build the ARPAnet, and for programmers like Henry Spencer

and Geoff Collyer to create ‘C news.’

In Fall, 1979, another significant event occurred. Graduate students

at Duke and the University of North Carolina were exploring the

possibilities of the UNIX operating system Version 7 that had come out

with a remote UNIX to UNIX copy program called uucp. They put

together some UNIX shell scripts into a program to make it possible to

connect the computers at their two schools via uucp and a homebrew

autodial modem using the telephone. They then presented their

achievement at a UNIX users’ conference and offered to set up an

electronic newsletter where UNIX users at different locations could help

each other with problems.

The computer network they created soon spread broadly and widely

and is now known as Usenet News, a computer users news which

reaches people around the world. It makes it possible for users to

participate in determining and posting the news that will be carried via

this global network. This news itself is a splendid achievement as it

involves a high level of automation and is administrated by people

around the world who have learned to work together and to help each

other solve technological problems of the technology. Also, there are

many who have created programs and other contributions to help make

this news possible. Most have done so with out financial gain, but as a

contribution to the networking community.

Via the network, the real conditions of people’s lives around the

world are being shared. Despite the great promise that computer

facilitated communication and automation provide, the conditions of the

common people’s lives are continually worsening. There are people out

of work, with high unemployment in France, Russia, the U.S., Canada,

etc. to name just a few of the countries from which this writer has gotten

first hand reports. Students are finding it hard to find jobs, either for the

summer to raise the money to return to school in the fall, or when they

graduate. Some employers even fire their workers for postings on the net

that tell the truth about shortcomings in computer industry products

Page 40

(such as has recently occurred with an employee of Digiboard being

fired for a post he made to Usenet.)

Workers who do have jobs are working long hours, with little or no

extra pay for the overtime hours. Computer workers in the U.S., for

example, have very little legal protection against long hours of work.

Meanwhile, trade unions in the U.S. like the UAW are oblivious to any

problems of workers and instead are busy putting their financial and

staff resources toward promoting the program of their political party,

while workers’ problems and ever worsening conditions are ignored.

But, what the spirit and tradition of May, 1848 shows is that

scientific inquiry and methods must be applied to both social and

technical problems if a society is to have the advantages possible from

science. Sir Francis Bacon explains how science is only possible if there

is a progressive and social purpose for that science. Therefore, when

problems are presented, like the further expansion of the net or how to

deal with the ever growing load of Usenet posts and newsgroups, there

is a need to subject these problems to scientific analysis and examina-

tion.

The real problems in society which result from the development of

automation have only begun to be subjected to such scientific analysis.

The 1833 Parliamentary Inquiry into factory conditions in Great Britain

demonstrated the kind of scientific data that needs to be gathered to

fashion legislation that deals with these real problems. Such a scientific

approach to the questions of the society and its economic problems was

pioneered in England and resulted in stronger laws to shorten the hours

of labor of the workers in the most mechanized factories of that time.

This scientific approach to legislation, whether it be legislation to guide

the expansion of the net or legislation in favor of shorter hours, is

needed today if the promise of the automation revolution is to be

realized. Bacon’s insight that the goal of one’s work affects whether

one’s work is scientific or not, applies to today’s research in automation

and computer communication. Will the efforts and work go to benefit

the people of the society or a small handful? The tradition of May 1848

shows that scientific work requires that the actual conditions of the

workers involved in the production of the society be subjected to the

same kind of scientific methods as other problems of science and tech-

Page 41

nology. By combining the concerns of workers with articles about

computers, the Amateur Computerist is continuing the tradition of the

Royal Society and of the Factory Inquiry into the conditions of the

laborers that were pioneered in England to make possible industrial

revolution. Such an approach is needed today if our society to gain the

fruits of the automation revolution.

Letters to Editor

The Net in Russia

The Amateur Computerist has corresponded with computer users in

Europe, Asia, North and South America, Australia and New Zealand.

We told our correspondents that we are interested in any comments they

may have about the newsletter and in what is happening with telecom-

munications where they live. Several have commented on the hard

economic times and high unemployment in their countries. We think it

is of value to share some of this correspondence with our readers. The

following is one example of these difficult living conditions described

in e-mail received from around the world. We welcome accounts of

current conditions for publication in future issues of the Amateur

Computerist.

We were told that in Russia there are many networks, but all of

them are quite expensive. Still educational and scientific institutions

may have free access to e-mail. E-mail is new for many people and there

is a lot to learn.

At one site we were told there are some 100 alt.* newsgroups to

select from. There are some 60 groups in the Russian language. Of these

50% are for commercial use – sell/buy, etc. About 15% are FIDO echoes

translated into newsgroups – you can read and mail to them.

A computer user wrote that his connectivity cost $500 per month

including an IP address. He added that e-mail payment depends on your

traffic in addition to a fixed monthly payment. He said he had heard

about the existence of Freenet and Glasnet in Russia but that they only

Page 42

provide e-mail.

From the news reports in the U.S. press it sounds like it is hard for

people to live in Russia. We asked how conditions were in Moscow?

Were prices very high? We were told that we were not far from reality

in thinking prices were high. The income per month is 5000 to 20,000

rubles. At the rate of $1 equaled 565 rubles he translated that to the

equivalent of $10 - $40 per month. Also the prices are quite high: a pair

of shoes cost 15,000 rubles. A user told us that the only good thing is

that they pay very little rent for flats but this situation is about to be

changed. When we asked if people feel that things will improve? We

were told that people were tired of discussing all that – it has lasted

already for eight years. The correspondent went on however to agree

with us that the computer revolution is the one bright spot that people

have to look forward to.

We ended one e-mail message: “Good to be in contact with you.”

And the Russian user replied, “Me too.”

It has been valuable to get first hand information about conditions

in other countries. We hope to continue and expand such contact. We

invite computer users around the world to write us about the network

connections and living and working conditions where they live.

About The Net in Uruguay

This is a more detailed explanation about telecommunications here,

as I promised.

For getting to the Internet I’m using the services of Chasque.

Chasque is a member of the Association for Progressive Communica-

tions, a non-profit organization (at least, that’s what THEY say), with

other members (networks) in other countries, like Pegasus in Australia,

Web in Canada, etc. (I don’t actually know much more about them). To

use this service for having mail on Internet (no ftp service available),

you pay an initial fee of U.S. $20. Then a monthly fee of U.S. $10; you

have an hour of connect time free with this. Additional connect time

costs U.S. $1.50/hour. Sending/receiving mail to the outside costs about

U.S. $.15/KB. So, getting a 100KB msg. costs me U.S. $15, but my

Page 43

modem is not very fast (1200 baud) so it takes me 20 minutes of on-line

time to download it, and that means additional expense.

I once joined a newsgroup on the Internet about the Atari ST; not

knowing the amount of text involved, I checked my mailbox three days

later and found so much text that although I un-joined the newsgroup

immediately, my monthly bill climbed to more than U.S. $35. (As a

guide, the minimum wage here is fixed by law at about U.S. $120

monthly, and U.S. $250/month is a good wage for normal office work.)

Recently, Fidonet started working here, thanks to the hard work of

a few enthusiasts. Although Fidonet is absolutely free in many countries,

here we decided that the expensive international phone bills and the

expensive fast modem was too high a cost for a single person. So, a

monthly fee of U.S. $3 is asked of all the people using international mail

(I think this is quite reasonable).

Well, hope this clarifies the telecomm issue. If you have further

doubts you can contact me on the usual Internet address or also on

Fidonet at the 4:850/1 node.

Regards, Jose Luis Regueiro

Uruguay

E-mail address:

Jose.Luis .Regueiro@ f1.n850.z4.fidonet.org

News and Views from the Shop Floor

The New Dawn

by Floyd Hoke-Miller

Let’s be wise and organize!

Get the Polly off our back;

Put the unions on the track

Of workers solidarity!

Educate to emancipate!

Page 44

Put the parasite to work;

Let none his duty shirk

Of classless regularity!

Don’t descry but glorify

The power workers hold:

Form an OBU and don’t be sold

As chattels in wage slavery!

Let our toils reap the spoils

Our horny hands produce;

Not for profit but for use

And end the class of knavery!

[Editor’s Note: OBU was the IWW dream of One Big Union for all workers]

Eyewitness Account of

Pittsburgh Press Strike

by Shawn Duffy

e-mail: [email protected]

The following is a more-or-less eyewitness account of the attempt

by the Pittsburgh Press to use replacement drivers. It took place in a

Xerox warehouse that was sub-leasing space to the Press. I don’t

remember the exact dates, except that they were in August, 1992.

Before the storm: I had been working at the warehouse since late

July. Xerox was moving it to Cincinnati. The workers were represented

by the United Steelworkers. Us temporaries were brought in to help

move things out.

After about a week and a half, the news said the Press would hire

replacements. Brought in from Boston, they were being paid $15/hr +

room + board. Security guards would ride shotgun. They were in rental

cars, with easy to spot Ohio plates. All this was on the news. Late

Thursday we were warned that they would be distributing the news from

Page 45

the unused warehouse space where we were working!

Friday: All’s quiet. The natural worries about crossing a picket line

surface. Being nonunion temporaries puts my work crew right in the

middle. All workers, permanent and temporary alike are warned to not

risk life and limb coming to work.

Monday: Scab paper goes into production. Two police cars guard

the plant gates. It is not known if the Teamsters know about this

distribution point. Scant news coverage. With most workers, including

myself, being either former union members, or having family union

members, and being tired of the way labor has been treated in the city,

watching helplessly, rental cars and Press trucks enter and exit all

morning.

Word around the warehouse is that all hell is breaking loose at Press

headquarters in town. The story makes short national attention.

Curiously, the Judge in charge doesn’t issue the automatic limitation of

pickets.

Tuesday: The day all hell breaks loose!

4:45 A.M. I enter the warehouse parking lot. Since it’s still dark,

and I am looking left to turn, I don’t notice the Teamsters across the

street. But many folks do. Several police cars and local media.

6:45 A.M. It’s first break, and light out. All kinds of excitement on

the line. I cross the street to get coffee at a little convenience store.

Security, which is already high because the warehouse is closing, is

fanned out around the parking lot. Most temporaries do not stand with

the strikers just yet. Being young and in college, we keep our distance

for now, what with all the tension between temps/perm employees to

begin with. I watch the hustle and bustle along the highway. I miss them

shaking a rental car and blocking traffic. Talking with some security

guards, it is apparent they will not stop anything major for the $6/hr they

are making. But the combination of them and the 15 or so police keep

everyone on their own side of the street.

7:00 A.M. Xerox employees trickle back to work. Some tell the

teamsters they will be back next break. I am invited to stand with them

next break. Most everyone is on the union’s side. One notable exception

is a kid who is a journalism major who says, “It’s because of the union

that the reporters are laid off.” Go figure. Most everyone else is totally

Page 46

with the union, though we talk of mistakes some unions have made in

the past, suggesting they need to hire some business majors, etc. But we

100% support them. Especially me and friend Doug. Both our dad’s

worked for the Port Authority, itself on strike just a few months ago, and

back to work by court order, still without a contract.

8:45 A.M. I get coffee and stand with the teamsters. So do many

others. In fact, so many do that we seem to outnumber the teamsters 2-1.

Teamsters are very happy about this. It looks good for the news. The bus

drivers honk to show support (I mentioned their strike earlier). So do

most truckers, and many cars. Strikers (and us!) yell “scab,” etc.

It is obvious the replacement drivers are under orders not to cause

any trouble, for as I cross the street, one stops the car DEAD, and gives

me the right of way. I cross her path as slowly as possible. Every little

bit helps! (I’m told later that a bus driver stopped in front of the gate and

said he broke down, tying things up for a while!).

10:45 We come out for lunch to cheers and applause! One of the

greatest feelings you can have! More standing to show support. The

picket leader thanks everyone. Press trucks are videotaping the line

(flipping the bird to them) as they pass. The union counters by taping the

trucks!

More police show up.

More shouting.

They ask us to gather round for a live shot for the noon news. A

rock was thrown at a car and someone went to the hospital. The Union

says it’s sticking to a “no violence” policy. The picket limitation order

has come down. The Police Chief ask Teamsters to disperse, and (with

laughter) tells us to get back to work.

One replacement driver has a change of heart, and refuses to exit the

grounds!

One of our workers yells, “You ought to be ashamed of yourself! as

we walk back.”

1:30 P.M. Last break of the day. Only a couple of pickets left. We

go back to work for overtime.

3:30 P.M. The day is over, and I go home. Some houses have signs

saying, “stop paper until end of strike” By the way: Many stores did too!

5:30 P.M. Local news has feature coverage. Vivid scenes. The man

Page 47

with a HUGE “No Scab Paper” sign in his front yard. Press drivers

sitting in front of the trucks. Young paperboys tossing papers back into

the distribution site. Smashed windows and slashed tires on rental

cars/Press trucks.

The Press surrenders and returns to negotiations!

Nightline does a story on the strike, one of the most well balanced

ones I’ve ever seen. Parallels are drawn with the Homestead strike of

100 years earlier (almost to the month).

Rest of week: Back to normal. Scab drivers trickle out. Turns out

some “Presses” were published in Canada. Deep scars.

(Epilogue: Jan 18, 1993, by the way: The Pittsburgh Press is

HISTORY! The Post Gazette bought them out. The whole transaction

shows me that the whole dispute was a ploy by the Press (who was

making a profit to the tune of $64 million a year) to run the smaller PG

out of business and take over morning distribution!)

John G. Kemeny:

BASIC and DTSS:

Everyone a Programmer

by Jay Hauben

Sadly, an important pioneer of the computer revolution has died.

John G. Kemeny, co-inventor of the computer language BASIC and of

the Dartmouth Time Sharing System (DTSS) and advocate of universal

education in programming died unexpectedly on December 26, 1992. He

was 66 years old.

John Kemeny was born in Budapest on May 31, 1926. His educa-

tion and intellectual development in Hungary must have been very

impressive, but in 1940, to escape the Nazi tide, his family emigrated to

New York City. Kemeny entered high school knowing virtually no

English. He graduated three years later, first in his class and accepted at

Princeton University to study mathematics.

Page 48

By the time Kemeny turned 18, he had finished his first year at

Princeton. He was immediately drafted and sent to Los Alamos to be a

“computer,” one of 20 operators who used 17 IBM bookkeeping

calculators to get numerical solutions to differential equations connected

with the design of the atom bomb. It took two or three weeks, working

three 8 hour shifts, six days per week, to get one result. The calculators

were fed punched cards, which were moved manually from machine to

machine. Between calculations, the plug boards had to be rewired by

hand. At the end of a cycle, the calculation was summarized on a

printout which had to be checked by eye for “catastrophes.” If any were

found, the cycle had to be repeated. Years later, Kemeny was to note

that one undergraduate working one afternoon, using a 1970 time

sharing computer could solve as many differential equations as the

whole Los Alamos team did in a whole year. And there could be 100

other users on the computer at the same time.

While at Los Alamos, Kemeny heard a lecture by fellow Hungarian

born John von Neumann who was a consultant to the “computer

operation.” Von Neumann proposed a fully electronic computer based

on a binary number system, with internal memory for both data and a

stored program. To Kemeny and the other “computers,” von Neumann’s

machine sounded like a dream. Kemeny wondered if he would live long

enough to ever use one.

After the war, Kemeny returned to Princeton. In 1948-49, while

finishing his dissertation, Kemeny served as Albert Einstein’s research

assistant at the Institute for Advanced Study. Von Neumann was at the

Institute also, working on the machine he had described in his lecture

two years earlier. Einstein and Kemeny crossed paths with von

Neumann occasionally and had some long conversations concerning

symbol handling as opposed to number handling computers.

Kemeny finished his Ph.D and stayed at Princeton teaching math

and philosophy until 1953. During his time at Princeton, his contact with

von Neumann and his computer had a deep effect on Kemeny. Here was

the brilliant mathematician playing around with the nuts and bolts of a

computing machine and raising profound philosophical questions about

the relation between humans and machines. In a Scientific American

article, “Man Viewed as a Machine” (vol. 192, April, 1955, pp. 58-67)

Page 49

Kemeny summarized lectures von Neumann had given just before

Kemeny left Princeton. Kemeny framed the question of these lectures,

“What could a machine do as well or better than a man?” The conclusion

in 1955 was that computers calculate faster than the human brain, may

eventually match the human brain in memory capacity, but have a long

way to go to exceed the compactness of the human brain or the

complexity the human brain is capable of dealing with. Next, based on

the work of the English logician Alan Turing, Kemeny argued that a

universal machine can be designed. That universal machine would need

a simple code designed for it that would describe any simple machine

humans could devise. Then the universal machine could do anything

every simple machine could do by converting the descriptions of the

simple machines into programs for its own operation. It occurred to

Kemeny that “a normal human being is like the universal machine.

Given enough time he can learn to do anything.” (ibid., p. 63) Kemeny

carried this understanding with him throughout his career of encouraging

universal teaching of computer programming.

In the summer of 1953, while a consultant at the Rand Corporation,

Kemeny had a chance to use the JONIAC, a copy of von Neumann’s

Princeton computer. He had great fun, he wrote, “learning to program a

computer, even though the language used at that time was designed for

machines and not for human beings.” (Man and The Computer, New

York, 1972, p. 7)

Kemeny joined the faculty of Dartmouth College in 1953 to teach

math and philosophy. For six years after he got there, Dartmouth had no

computer. Kemeny could however commute 135 miles each way to use

the computer at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He did and therefore

witnessed the coming in 1957 of the FORTRAN programming language.

Kemeny welcomed FORTRAN because it made much more sense to

him to teach a machine a language that is easier for human beings to

learn than to force every human to learn the machine’s own language.

“All of a sudden access to computers by thousands of users became not

only possible but reasonable.” (ibid, p. 8)

Dartmouth acquired its first computer in 1959, a very small

computer called the LGP-30. Kemeny facilitated the use of the LGP-30

by undergraduate students. The ingenuity and creativeness of some of

Page 50

the students who had been given hands-on experience amazed the

Dartmouth faculty. Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz, also of the Dartmouth

math department, were thus encouraged to “set in motion the then

revolutionary concept of making computers as freely available to college

students as library books.” (Portraits in Silicon, Robert Slater, Cam-

bridge, 1987, p. 22) The aim was to make accessible to all students the

wonderful research environment that computers could provide.

The work of Kemeny and Kurtz in the early 1960's took two

directions. Influenced by the work of J. C. R. Licklider and John

McCarthy at MIT, Kemeny understood that a time sharing system would

make possible the universal access they aimed for. A team of the two

faculty members and a group of undergraduate research assistants

developed a prototype system. It allowed multiple users short spurts of

access to the central computer from remote terminals in such a way that

each user enjoyed the illusion that he was the sole user. This Dartmouth

Time Sharing System (DTSS) became operational in the Fall of 1964.

The value of a time sharing system is that it ended the hardship of batch

processing which often required hours or even days of waiting between

runs of a program while it was being developed and debugged. Time

sharing utilizes the great speed of computers compared to humans to

greatly enhance the efficiency of computing from the point of view of

the human users.

Today’s packet switching networks (e.g, the Internet) owe a great

deal to the development of this time sharing system conceptually and

technically. But earlier, DTSS almost got derailed. Kemeny had worked

closely with General Electric during the time DTSS was being worked

on. In 1966, GE and Dartmouth agreed to work on a joint development

of the time sharing operating system. However GE’s commercial

purposes conflicted with Dartmouth’s educational purposes. The story

is told that GE tried to “stop the Dartmouth experiment” and the

development of the time sharing system called Phase I. (See e.g.,

Computer Lib, Ted Nelson, South Bend, 1974, p. 45). But Kemeny and

Kurtz, determined not to let DTSS disappear, encouraged the develop-

ment of DTSS Phase II by 1969.

In addition to time sharing, Kemeny and Kurtz realized that a new

computer language was needed that could be easily learned and

Page 51

accessible to typical college students. Kemeny noted, “We at Dartmouth

envisaged the possibility of millions of people writing their own

computer programs.” (Man and the Computer, p. 30) They designed

their language with plain English and high school algebra like com-

mands and so that the lay user could learn a very few commands and

then be able to write interesting programs. Kemeny started to work on

a draft version in September, 1963. The result was BASIC, Beginners

All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code. The first BASIC program ran

on May 1, 1964 at 4:00 am. Kemeny and Kurtz made an effort to get as

many students as possible using BASIC and they were available to hear

about problems and bugs and to come up with bug fixes. Kemeny and

Kurtz wanted BASIC to be in the public domain. Dartmouth copyrighted

BASIC but made it available without charge.

The careful work of Kemeny and Kurtz to make an easy-to-learn but

powerful computer language bore tremendous fruit. After its introduc-

tion at Dartmouth in 1964, BASIC spread as did DTSS to other

campuses and government and military situations. And BASIC made

personal computers possible. Beginning in 1975 with the success of Bill

Gates and Paul Allen to write an interpreter for a subset of BASIC

commands for the Altair computer, one form or another of BASIC

spread to and accelerated the personal computer revolution. (See

Amateur Computerist, vol 2 no 4, pp. 9-12)

For a while the great appeal of personal computers and their falling

costs and general availability eclipsed Kemeny and Kurtz’s seminal

work on DTSS and the original BASIC. By the late 1980's, 10 to 12

million school children had learned BASIC, more people than speak,

e.g., Norwegian. The personal computer helped “distribute” computing,

which Kemeny thought was crucial to the progress of society. But it also

diminished in importance the centralized computing power and the inter-

connectivity of users that time-sharing made possible. Only recently,

with the spread of computer networks is the value of both developments

being realized. Now the power of personal computer workstations,

instead of dumb terminals, coupled with the connectivity and remote

resource availability is making possible the human-computer and

human-human interfacing that Kemeny predicted.

From 1971 to 1980, Kemeny was the thirteenth President of

Page 52

Dartmouth College presiding for example over the transition there to co-

education. He continued his efforts to support a crucial role for

computers in education but was unable to be a major contributor to

developments like the personal computer and the various versions of

BASIC. In 1979, Kemeny served as the Chairman of President Carter’s

Commission on the Accident at Three Mile Island. Kemeny “very much

regretted” that the Commission did not recommend a temporary halt on

construction permits for nuclear reactors. The investigation had found

that the government regulators were too lax in their regulation. The

Commission concluded, “the evidence suggests that the NRC (Nuclear

Regulatory Commission) has sometimes erred on the side of the

industry’s convenience rather than carrying out its primary mission of

insuring safety” and that the industry took inadequate safety precautions

and failed to respond to known unsafe conditions. (The Report of The

President’s Commission on the Accident at Three Mile Island, pp. 43, 51

and 188)

After Kemeny stopped being President of Dartmouth and Chairman

of the Three Mile Island Accident Commission, he took stock of the use

of computers, especially in education. He was furious and frustrated by

the slow progress of education in computer programming, although it is

not clear whether he was aware of the forces like Ford Motor Company

which opposed that progress. Between 1983 and 1985, Kemeny and

Kurtz went back to work and produced a portable and more powerful

version of their original BASIC. They called it TRUE BASIC and it is

still marketed today with the intention of introducing “students to the

very important art of computer programming and analytic thinking.”

Kemeny had a very broad vision of the role computers would play

in society. He foresaw a man-machine symbiosis that would help both

to evolve rapidly. In the early 1970s he predicted that within 20 years

there would be a national computer network with terminals in millions

of homes, so every home would be a mini university. He also predicted

there would be a National Automated Reference Library, a national

personalized computer delivered news service, and, especially, greatly

enhanced education via time-sharing and simple programming lan-

guages. Kemeny worked hard to implement his visions and felt by the

late 1980s great disappointment in the slow progress. He died just as the

Page 53

great computer networking structures that have developed in some large

measure because of his pioneering work and vision, have begun to fulfill

more of his expectations, but also just as a fight is being waged by those

who want to commercialize these networking structures and those who

want to keep them in the public domain.

Kemeny recognized that the social problems that have yet to be

solved are immense. He wrote, “while computers alone cannot solve the

problems of society, these problems are too complex to be solved

without highly sophisticated use of computers.” (ibid., p. 80) and that it

is imperative that computers be freely available. “Only if we manage to

bring up a computer-educated generation will society have modern

computers fully available to solve its serious problems.” (ibid.) He saw

the computer revolution as a possible asset for society but felt “it is a

major mistake to make plans for the solution of social problems on the

assumption that society will in the future will be organized in exactly the

same way as today. For the first time in human history we have an

opportunity for significant social planning. We cannot afford to waste

it.” (ibid., p. 143)

John Kemeny was part of many of the seminal events of the

computer revolution. He made major contributions to its foundation and

he thought deeply into this revolution. His death was untimely but he has

left the value of his work to help us take on the challenges that confront

the progress that he contributed to.

Page 54

Computers for the People:

Part V

[continued from Amateur Computerist vol 4 no 4)

In an article called “How We Trapped the Dinosaurs,” (from

Creative Computing, Nov. 1984, p. 193-4), Lee Felsenstein describes the

early 1970s and the lessons learned from the creation of the personal

computer by the grassroots computers for the people movement. He

writes, “Many of us were then starting to shed our adolescent views of

techno-logical development as we moved from the educational system

into the lowest levels of the production system. Many of us quickly

noticed that our noble managers knew less about the technology with

which we were working than we knew.” (ibid.) Felsenstein continues,

“We also started to see that the business of Business was making money,

not products, and that if they could make money with turkey products,

then we would be put to making turkey products and doing nothing

else.” (ibid.)

“And we discovered,” he explains, “that the Big Boys of the

computers were not, after all, engaged in a race to get the most users at

the lowest cost but were instead playing marketing muscle games to lock

the biggest proportion of users to the highest cost computers possible.”

(ibid.)

In the face of the commercial world’s reluctance to develop a low

cost personal computer, Felsenstein describes how the grassroots

movement took on to prepare itself for the task. He writes, “So we did

the only thing we could under the circumstances, we learned as much as

we could about our technology and kept alive our sci-fi dreams of a

future where everyone could have a computer, and no one could be lock-

ed out of all the fun and fascinating things we knew could be done with

computers.... We hadn’t spent all that time learning all that stuff,” he

explains, “because someone had asked us to. It had a beauty all its own

which we could understand and which we wanted to share with every-

one.” (ibid.)

When the Altair 8080 computer Kit arrived in January 1975, the

Homebrewers were ready. “Then,” he recounts, “with the sudden

Page 55

ferocity of events overtaking the dreamer, we were in the midst of the

explosion.” (ibid.) Suddenly the movement to build the personal

computer took off. Working together, the Homebrewers took on to

produce the needed software and hardware, sharing their success and

failures. The participants found themselves involved “in a kind of group

sport.” Felsenstein explains: “Like Athletes, they strove to do what had

never been done, to exceed their known limits and to share their

successes and efforts with each other in the hopes that all would gain.”

(ibid.)

“We ran ahead of the lumbering giants,” Felsenstein writes,

explaining how the Homebrewers did not wait for the big corporations

in the computer industry to give them an affordable computer. He

describes how the Homebrewers “frantically staked out our territory. We

learned,” he emphasizes, “as pioneers must, to rely on each other.”

(ibid.)

Felsenstein then describes what happened when IBM produced “the

breadbox of incompatibility” in 1978, the 5100. IBM found they

couldn’t sell it. When they produced their next personal computer, the

5150 in 1981, IBM demonstrated that they had learned that they had to

play by the rules established by the Homebrewers. They had to make the

architecture and executive code as public as possible and to encourage

individuals to write software and add-ons. Felsenstein summarizes the

victory of the Homebrewers, “We didn’t give the Corporate Establish-

ment free rein in the hopes that they would bless us with innovations.

We trampled all over their organized way of doing things.” (ibid.) Thus

the birth of the personal computer was the victory of the Homebrewers’

computers for the people movement over the dinosaurs of the corporate

world.

In his article “Thinking about Thinking Machines,” (ibid. p. 253) Tom

Stonier comments on the technological advance represented by the

personal computer. He writes: “In the course of history, human

ingenuity has created many a wondrous device, none so marvelous,

however, as the computer. In that long road of human technology which

among other things, flaked stone; mastered fire; developed speech;

domesticated plants and animals; forged bronze; created those great

ancient civilizations and all the technology needed for them; invented

Page 56

Francis Bacon’s famous trio – gunpowder, the compass, and the printing

press – and then moved onwards to fashion the steam engine, balloons,

factories, railways, steel, electricity, telephones, horseless carriages,

airplanes, rockets, radio and television...in that long road, no invention

will prove to be as profound as the computer.... Thus, the modes of

production are changing once again – this time as a result of automation

and the increasing use of robots.... The introduction of the computer into

the productive process is therefore at least as profound as the Industrial

Revolution.” (Creative Computing, Nov. 1984, p. 252)

But as with the Industrial Revolution, so now, a curious phenome-

non has developed. The skilled, experienced workers of the industrial

heartland are being heaved out of their jobs and factories. The myth of

the workerless factory has exploded in the face of General Motors. They

can’t introduce the new technology without involving workers in the

process and allowing workers to obtain the technological education and

knowledge that will enable today’s workers to make the new machines

function. Instead there is the myth that supervisors or engineers will

program the machines and get rid of the workers. But the supervisors

and engineers are not the skilled or unskilled workers who know how to

make the machines work. The result of this attempt by management to

interfere with automation has resulted in serious dislocations of workers

and industry. (See, for example, a letter to the editor in the Flint Journal,

Flint, MI, April 4, 1987, “Halt Rampant Mismanagement at Buick

City.”)

Computers are not a replacement for people. And if knowledge of

how the computer functions and is programmed is purposely kept from

workers, disasters of technological ineptitude like that which have

occurred at GM and Ford will be repeated tenfold.

John Kemeny, the creator of BASIC, explains how the business

world has gotten on the wrong track with computers by trying to use

them to replace the workforce. He explains:

“Modern computers were invented to solve highly complex

scientific problems. It was an accidental benefit, only slowly recognized

by business that the very same computers were incredibly efficient

bookkeeping machines. Then the drive was on to employ computers to

increase productivity, to cut down costs, and to produce greater

Page 57

efficiency. Companies had great hopes that computers could replace

hundreds of employees. Needless to say this did not make computers

popular with employees. Fortunately it has rarely been the case that

computerization has reduced the existing staff; it is much more common

that along with computers exactly the same staff is needed but the staff

can perform better and accomplish more.” (Man and Computer, p. 56-

57)

Kemeny compares the change taking place with computers to that

brought by the automobile:

“Most people grew up when no modern computers were in exis-

tence. While the same situation applied to automobiles in the early

twentieth century, a fairly rapid change took place. Even if not everyone

drove an automobile, almost everyone had a friend who owned one.

Automobiles quickly became common on our streets, and their princi-

ples of operation were simple and easily understood. Unfortunately the

average person does not have the foggiest idea of just what a computer

is or how it works. And since computers are shielded from them by the

high priests of the profession, all their acquaintance is from a distance.”

(ibid. p. 57)

Kemeny might have gone on to explain that just as in England at the

time of the industrial revolution, so here in the U.S., there is a purposeful

exclusion of workers from technical knowledge. Just as in England in

the 1800s, so we see here,”two systems of education catered for different

classes and provided education different in quality and content for rulers

and ruled.” (The Computer from Pascal to Von Neumann, Goldstine, p.

31)

This exclusion, Goldstine explains, “was going on just at the time

when the Industrial Revolution was making education ever more

essential to all members of society. In 1823 George Birbeck (1776-1841)

founded his first Mechanics’ Institute in Scotland, and similar institutes

spread into England under the patronage of Henry Brougham (1778-

1868). These brought to the workingman the advantages of a technologi-

cal training just when it was most needed in England.... These schools

are the place in which the... [workers -ed] learned their business – for an

annual fee of one guinea. Most of these men were not middle-class; for

example, Stephenson, the inventor of the locomotive, was a poor boy

Page 58

who taught himself to read when he was seventeen.” (ibid.) And

Goldstine could have gone on to point out that Watt, who invented the

steam engine was a watchmaker, Arkwright who invented the throttle

was a barber, and the inventor of the steamship was Fulton, a working

jeweler.

(to be continued)

Try This:

Pascal Program

(Grade Averaging)

by Tom Smith

Program Grad (Input,Output);

Const

Maxscore = 100; (* maxium score *)

ABLine = 90; (* Dividing line

between A & B *)

BCLine = 80; (* Dividing line

between B & C *)

CDLine = 70; (* Dividing line

between C & D *)

DFLine = 60; (* Dividing line

between D & F *)

Var

Grade: Char;

Ave1, Score, Small, Large, Gp, Sum, Count, Gpsum: Integer;

Gpa, Ave: Real;

Honors: Boolean; (* Honor student or

not *)

Begin

Honors:= false;

Sum:= 0;

Page 59

Count:= 0;

Small:= 1000;

Gpsum:= 0;

Large:= 0;

Repeat

Writeln (‘To quit enter score

over 100');

Writeln (‘Enter score’);

Readln (score);

If Score < 101 then

Begin

If Score < Small then Small:=

Score;

If Score > Large then Large:=

Score;

Case Score div 10 of

9,10: Begin

Grade:= ‘A’;

Honors:= true;

Gp:= 4;

End;

8: Begin

Grade:= ‘B’;

Honors:= True;

Gp:= 3;

End;

7: Begin

Grade:= ‘C’;

Gp:= 2;

End;

6: Begin

Grade:= ‘D’;

Gp:= 1;

End;

0,1,2,3,4,5: Begin

Grade:= ‘F’;

Gp:= 0;

End;

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End; (* Case *)

Sum:= Score + Sum;

Count:=Count + 1;

Gpsum:= Gpsum + Gp;

End;

Ave:= Sum / Count;

Gpa:= Gpsum / Count;

Ave1:=Trunc(Ave);

Writeln (‘Your lowest score is ‘,

Small);

Writeln (‘Your highest score is ‘,

Large);

Writeln (‘Your average score is ‘,

Ave:2:2);

Writeln (‘Your grade point average

is ‘, Gpa:2:2);

Case Ave1 Div 10 of

9,10: Begin

Honors:= true;

Writeln (‘Honor Student !

A !’);

End;

8: Begin

Honors:= true;

Writeln (‘Honor Student ! B

!’);

End;

7: Writeln (‘Grade is ‘, Grade

);

6: Writeln (‘Grade is ‘, Grade

);

0,1,2,3,4,5: Writeln (‘You have

flunked! ‘, Grade);

End;

Until Score > Maxscore

End

Page 61

Try This:

Program in C

for UNIX Users

FGIGO

by Scott McMahon

([email protected])

The curses library is a high level interface to the termcap/terminfo

libraries which were originally designed for the vi text editor, but were

later separated into a separate package. Various versions of curses and

the termcap/terminfo routines exist in just about every version of UNIX,

and they have been ported to other computers and operating systems.

Termcap/terminfo is a way to store information on what a terminal can

do – character attributes (normal, reverse, bold, blinking text), cursor

positioning, and other things the terminal can do. Then a user program

can look up the terminal type it’s running on and know what it can do

and what escape codes need to be sent to it to get it to do things. Curses

takes this one step further by creating a high level library which allows

the user to call functions like move() and have the library take care of all

the details of what to do with each terminal.

Fgigo takes a file and randomly piles up the bytes in it on your

screen. It comes from another, less interesting program called gigo

which piled up random bytes on the screen. The name stands for

‘file-garbage in, garbage out’.

To compile this program, save it in a file called fgigo.c, and give the

command:

% cc -o fgigo fgigo.c -lcurses

-ltermcap

at the UNIX shell prompt. (This program is written for BSD systems. On

a System V based system, you may need to link it with the terminfo

libraries. I don’t have a System V computer available to try porting this

to.)

#include <sys/types.h> /* all this junk just to open a file! */

Page 62

#include <sys/stat.h>

#include <fcntl.h>

#include <curses.h>

#define BORDER

“-------------------------\

-----------------------------------

------------------“

main(int ac, char *av[]) {

/* Variables – y is the calculated column where the symbol will drop to the bottom,

and i is the iterations while it is falling. an 80x24 screen is pretty much hard wired into

this.

file is the file descriptor

byte is the byte we’re reading in

int y,i, file;

char byte;

/* we’ve got to have 2 args – the program name, and the name of the file to read,

anything more or less is an error

if (ac != 2) {

printf(“usage: %s

textfile\n”,av[0]);

exit(1);

}

/* we need to make sure we could open and read this file – if not, it’s an error

if ( (file = open(av[1], O_RDONLY, 0)) <= -1 ) {

printf(“%s: could not open %s\n,” av[0], av[1]);

exit(1);

}

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/* do all this stuff to initialize curses */

initscr(); cbreak(); noecho(); nonl(); clear();

refresh();

/* seed random numbers – your pid is unique & pretty random */

srand(getpid());

/* print out the border #defined above */

move(23,0);

addstr(BORDER);

refresh();

while(1) {

y = rand() % 79;

/* we read a byte – 1 character – at a time, and stop when read returns a zero

if (!(read(file,&byte,1))) break;

/* we only want ascii, not control characters or whitespace */

if (!isprint(byte) || isspace(byte)) continue;

for (i=0; i<22; i++) {

move(i+1,y);

if (inch() != ‘ ’) continue;

addch(byte);

refresh();

move(i,y);

addch(‘ ’);

refresh();

}

sleep(1); /* can’t get a keypress in without this delay! */

Page 64

}

endwin();

}

May Day in History

May 1 from Roman Times: Celebration of spring planting and fertility.

May 1, 1848: Enactment of Ten Hours Factory Act be English Parliament

after a half century of agitation and struggle for shorter hours of work.

May 1, 1886: Over 400,000 U.S. workers strike for an eight hour working

day. Four workers were killed by police at the McCormick Harvester Plant on

May 3. The next day was the Haymarket Square explosion for which eight

anarchists were framed.

May 1, 1890: Massive world wide workers’ demonstration for the eight

hour day.

May 1, 1891 to the present: Demonstrations in many cities around the

world to show worker solidarity and to agitate for workers’ causes especially

shorter hours of work.

May 1, 1942: Publication of the Searchlight, uncensored local union

newspaper of UAW Local 659, Flint, MI.

May 1, 1964: The birth of the BASIC computing language by Kemeny

and Kurtz.

May 1, 1973: The birth of Amateur Computerist editor, Michael Hauben.

May 1, 1992: First electronic issue of the Amateur Computerist, vol 4, no

2/3.

Page 65

Charter for Newsgroup on Usenet

[ Editor’s Note: In September, 1992, the Amateur Computerist initiated

a newsgroup on Usenet News called alt.amateur-comp. Since then there

have been almost 1000 items and responses posted there. Some of those

posts were drafts and discussions of articles which appear in this issue.

Following is the charter which proposed the newsgroup. We welcome

your participation in alt.amateur-comp.]

The alt.amateur-comp is a conference where readers and writers can

discuss the articles and subjects that appear in the electronic and printed

newsletter The Amateur Computerist. The Amateur Computerist was

born out of the battle to continue computer programming classes for

workers at the Ford Rouge Factory in Dearborn, MI, after Ford and

UAW officials ended the classes in February 1987. In our first issue we

wrote: “There was an effort by administrators of the UAW-Ford

program at the Dearborn Engine Plant to kill interest in computers and

computer programming. We want to keep interest alive because

computers are the future.” (“Introduction,” vol I, no. 1)

The first issue of the newsletter was published February 11, 1988

and was dedicated to the Flint sitdown pioneers who began the UAW.

Articles have appeared in the newsletter from some of those pioneers

who welcomed the newsletter and the computer, saying, “From the

Great Wall to the Great Pyramid, from the hieroglyphics to the screen

of the computer, mankind is still progressing.” (“Dawn of a New Era,”

vol I, no. 1) The sitdowner pioneers who built the UAW believed that

the problems of automation had still to be solved by the upcoming

generation.

The newsletter is dedicated to support for grassroots efforts and

movements like the “computers for the people movement” that gave

birth to the personal computer in the 1970's and 1980's. Hard efforts of

many people over hundreds of years led to the production of a working

computer in the 1940's and then a personal computer that people could

afford in the 1970's. This history has been serialized in several issues of

the newsletter.

Page 66

Most recently the newsletter has begun an online edition that is

available free. We are beginning to document the progressive impact of

democratic developments like Usenet News and the Internet and we plan

to have a supplement dedicated to these developments. [See Fall 1992

issue -ed.]

The Amateur Computerist was described by Andrew Ross and

Constance Pawley in their recent book Technoculture (Univ. of

Minnesota Press, 1991, p. 125) as follows:

“When worker education classes in computer programming were

discontinued by management at the Ford Rouge Plant in Dearborn,

Michigan, United Auto Workers members began to publish a newsletter

called the Amateur Computerist to fill the gap. Among the columnists

and correspondents in the magazine have been veterans of the Flint sit-

down strikes who see a clear historical continuity between the problem

of labor organization in the thirties and the problem of automation and

deskilling today. Workers’ computer literacy is seen as essential not only

to the demystification of the computer and the reskilling of workers, but

also to labor’s capacity to intervene in decisions about new technologies

that might result in shorter hours and thus in ‘work efficiency’ rather

than worker efficiency.”

The newsgroup will also make available the electronic version of

the Amateur Computerist when a new issue is published.

One of the reasons for proposing this group is that there is currently

no place on Usenet that we know of where issues involving computers

and workers are dealt with.

If you wish to directly contact the editors write to either: Ronda

Hauben at: ae547@yfn.ysu.edu or [email protected] or Michael

Hauben at:

[email protected].

The opinions expressed in articles are those of their

authors and not necessarily the opinions of the

Amateur Computerist newsletter. We welcome sub-

missions from a spectrum of viewpoints.

Page 67

EDITORIAL STAFF

Ronda Hauben

William Rohler

Norman O. Thompson

Michael Hauben (1973-2001)

Jay Hauben

The Amateur Computerist invites submissions.

Articles can be submitted via e-mail:

[email protected]

Permission is given to reprint articles from this issue in a

non profit publication provided credit is given, with name

of author and source of article cited.

ELECTRONIC EDITION

ACN Webpage:

http://www.ais.org/~jrh/acn/

All issues of the Amateur Computerist are on-line.

Back issues of the Amateur Computerist are available at:

http://www.ais.org/~jrh/acn/Back_Issues/

All issues can be accessed from the Index at:

http://www.ais.org/~jrh/acn/NewIndex.pdf

Page 68