[Wylug-discuss] Thos. W. Ward

[John]

On Thu, Jun 27, 2013 at 09:38:06PM +0100, Richard Ibbotson wrote:
> On Thursday 27 Jun 2013 21:14:26 you wrote:
> > My understanding is that most software was open source until the
> > 1970s because the universities who maintained most of it shared bug
> > hunting and patching with users and IBM relied on users to share
> > their expertise to develop their software.
> > 
> > It was only with the arrival of software that was independent of the
> > hardware in the 1970s that closed source became the norm.
> > 
> > Or have I missed something?
> 
> Dunno.. what I experienced was that most of the software that was 
> around in the 70's was so closed source that if you mentioned software 
> to anyone then you got a Special Branch officer following you around 
> immediately.  Almost as if the word software was officially secret in 
> itself.

The whole ICL / Special Branch stuff is something I have never
experienced even slightly.  As others have said, software was exchanged
fairly freely (if awkwardly, as mag tape was a pain but better than
paper tape etc!).  I can recall swapping source code in Fortran, C,
Macro-11, Basic-Plus and even 8080 ASM.  Oh, and some Algols (mainly
60).

John