The Past Is Another Country

Monday, February 24, 2020

In February 1990, someone wrote to comp.windows.x asking why the MIT X Consortium did not provide binaries for the X Window System, only sources. Someone from the Consortium wrote back to respond with several reasons, which all essentially boiled down into “nobody here wants to spend the money and effort,” given the number of systems the Consortium would have to purchase and maintain—this was a time when lots of incompatible systems proliferated; nobody was quite sure where the market would come out—and then wait on compiling them (compiles were much slower then).

Dinah Anderson also responded, in a somewhat more helpful vein: 

Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!snorkelwacker!bloom-beacon!NICOLLE.BCM.TMC.EDU!dinah
From: dinah@NICOLLE.BCM.TMC.EDU (Dinah Anderson)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: Re: Why not distribute binaries?
Message-ID: <9002211836.AA02347@nicolle.bcm.tmc.edu>
Date: 21 Feb 90 18:36:54 GMT
Organization: The Internet

Integrated Computing Systems (ICS) will send you binaries for most common
(Watch me get in trouble now...) systems like Sun,etc. for a real reasonable
price. i believe the brochure I just got said $450. That is worth the price
of not compiling it yourself!

I have done business with these guys before and they do good work. They
also offer support and consultation services. They can be contacted at
(617)547-0510 or info@ics.com.


Dinah Anderson				Manager of Systems Integration
Baylor College of Medicine              Houston, Texas
internet: dinah@bcm.tmc.edu             uucp: {rutgers,mailrus}!bcm!dinah

$450 here is $891.26 in 2019 dollars, according to the calculator I used. Only seven or eight years later, in the late 90s, I would have laughed out loud if someone had suggested that I pay the equivalent of almost a thousand dollars rather than compile something. Of course, by that time, the calculus had changed quite a bit.

  • Some (many?) of the contenders had fallen by the wayside.
  • Those left had often seen the writing on the wall and pushed some standardization; and, at least the Unix-like ones got serious about the Single UNIX Specification, even where (like Linux), they weren’t formally compliant.
  • Computers were (much) more powerful for less money.
  • Tools from GNU had become widespread, so for a lot of software (not X, to be sure, though), compiling software on your own system wasn't much more difficult than just ./configure && make.
  • And to be completely fair, I was a high school and then college student in that period, so I probably had a lot more free time than someone wanting something for work.

But of course, the biggest difference between 1990 and 1997 is just the Internet, in size, speed, and ease of use. Anderson felt the need to specify in her signature the bangpath to reach her. By 1997, I had been told of such things, but I never actually saw them or used them. The world had moved on to TCP/IP, SMTP, and always-on connections; and manually routing anything for the most part meant you were Doing It Wrong. The World Wide Web and search engines for it (though not Google quite yet) now existed—you could easily find something and download it, rather than rely on someone to curate an FTP site, or tapes sent through postal mail.

ICS still exists, by the way, if I’m correct that Anderson got the name of Integrated Computer Solutions slightly wrong (or it’s changed its name slightly since then). The website says they’ve been focused on computer interfaces and user experience since 1987, and the phone number is in the same area code, so if it’s the same company I wouldn’t be surprised.

I don’t have any real point to make here, other than “Gosh, things sure have changed!” I just enjoy the history and the walk down memory lane.