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UNIX News / ;login:

Transcriptions of UNIX News from 1975 to 1977.

This was the first newsletter for UNIX and it provides unique insight into the early community outside of Bell Labs. It announced news, showcased modifications sites made to their installations, coordinated meetups, listed the first licensees and mailing list subscribers, and distributed patches. In July 1977, UNIX News was renamed to ;login: and in June/July 1978, USENIX was officially formed. For a good history of this period, see "Unix at 25", written by Peter H. Salus for BYTE.

I aim to transcribe all of UNIX News and early issues of ;login: through at least February 1980. When it renamed to ;login:, the cover page became typeset with troff and, ideally, that formatting could be reconstructed, but I have no experience with troff. I do not currently plan to transcribe later issues, unless it can be almost entirely automated, but that should be more tractable as they are more readable. The last twenty years were released as a print magazine and a digital version, and the text could be extracted. Contributions welcome.

Sources

These issues are primarily sourced the USENIX Archives on the Internet Archive and usenix.org. Their Internet Archive collection has scans of July 30, 1975 to December 2000 and usenix.org has the digital versions of August 2000 to Winter 2020. (usenix.org links to the Internet Archive scans for October 1997 to July 2000.) Starting in February 2012, issues are available in PDF, EPUB, and MOBI formats. When both scanned and digital versions are available, the scan is the primary link below.

Before the first normal issue, three special issues were mailed, the third of which is sourced from Hendrik-Jan Thomassen's copy sent to KU Nijmegen. The July 1976 issue is sourced from John Gilmore's scans of issues July 16, 1975 to September 1978 [TUHS mirror]. The July 30, 1975 and February 10, 1976 issues are supplemented with better scans from the University of Waterloo Archives.

License

UNIX News was distributed in 1975–1977 to holders of a UNIX license from Western Electric. In 2002, Caldera granted a free BSD-4-Clause license to UNIX Versions 1–7 and 32V, which would include UNIX News. The scans in the USENIX Archives on the Internet Archive are released under Public Domain Mark 1.0.

Issues