Fifty Years Of Diff | blarg
The first manual was duplicated for a very small coterie. In order to channel queries directly to the horses’ mouths, authorship was attributed to individuals. Later, as authorship diffused, on the principle of”You touched it last; it’s yours,” authorship was attributed only in the segregated chapter of unofficial “user maintained programs.” Beginning with v7, this back-of-the-bus chapter was reserved for games.
As the system was elaborated, peer pressure in the research group caused rough places to be smoothed, vague ideas to be sharpened, and feeble programs to be extinguished. Most details of the con stant questioning and experimentation during the early period of rapid change are long forgotten, as are hundreds of transitory states that were recorded in the on-line manual. From time to time, however, a snap-shot was taken in the form of a new printed edition. Quite contrary to commercial practice, where a release is supposed to mark a stable, shaken-down state of affairs, the very act of preparing a new edition often caused a flurry of improvements simply to forestall embarrassing admissions of imperfection.”
I haven’t seen anybody mentioning it or even noticing it; it’s just the water we swim in now, if we make software. But this month marks the fiftieth anniversary of a core piece of free software technology that would quickly become a seminal piece of collaborative software, the bedrock under every version control system and arguably the single most important piece of social software ever created.
