20 Years Ago in USENIX

The Toronto meeting had nearly 400 attendees. In the five years from May 1974 to June 1979, USENIX had acquired its name, and its meetings had waxed nearly twentyfold. UNIX had gone to 7th Edition.

Moreover, the ARPANET had grown to over 100 host sites, many of which used UNIX. Soon most of the hosts would be employing UNIX.

Bill Joy was shipping 2BSD (which contained software to be used with both V6 and V7), but would soon begin shipping 3BSD (Berkeley UNIX for the VAX, based on the 32V code, but with Berkeley utilities and a new virtual-memory system).

Remember: UNIX now ran on the Interdata and the VAX as well as the PDP-11s it was generally used for. The result was that folks worldwide saw it as a versatile, portable system.

At the beginning of the next year (1980), even the Department of Defense would realize that this was an advantage.

But prior to that, John Bass would organize another "western" meeting at SRI (it would be Brian Redman's first USENIX meeting) and, most importantly, Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis, students at Duke, came up with NETNEWS. Steve Bellovin, then at the University of North Carolina, wrote the first implementation.

USENET began as an exchange of information between UNC and Duke. But less than a year later, news leaked out.