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>"Open" here was a popular term back in the day and bunch of companies used it .. sorta like AI, LLM, and blockchain.

nah. what you are describing is Open in the present day, like OpenAI.

back in the day it meant "open standards, allowing cooperation between secretive competitors". IBM and Digital could both implement to an open standard instead of their traditional proprietary so their devices would interoperate.

This type of openness is what Microsoft liked to "embrace, extend, extinguish", meaning "we'll get kudos joining the interoperating consortium, we'll look cutting edge by adding features which would make us not actually interoperate but are useful so people will adopt them, then we will have killed off this threat to our monopoly"

in that same period of time, open source started to be called that because what was open was the source.




Back in the day there was ITS, Maclisp and Emacs on top of TECO.


That was gone at a time when Lisp Machines were commercialized (81/82). Emacs there was called Zmacs and was written in Lisp. Maclisp was replaced by Lisp Machine Lisp / ZetaLisp / Common Lisp. UNIX was then a thing.

Open Genera in the early 90s then ran on OSF/1 UNIX (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSF/1 , renamed to Digital UNIX) on DEC Alpha. OSF meant Open Software Foundation ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Software_Foundation ), a group propagating "open standards" for UNIX.


Curiously, GNU was born in that era, to give the Unix users the freedom from ITS, Maclisp, Emacs and the rest of the projects from MIT.

Instead of having slow-ish boot times in a Lisp machine, GNU's plan was to put several memory-protected concurrent interpreters under Unix, giving the user far more power by default with GNU/Hurd against a common Unix users. WIth namespaces, for instance, you could forget about suid and/or needing group perms to mount a device or access different media and soundcards.


ITS, Maclisp, Emacs, and TECO were not gone in 1982. But admittedly on their way out.




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