Fifteen Years of UniForum

Members Recall the Early Days: Bill Joy at His Card Table

Fifteen-year veteran Jim Anderberg remembers the early days of UniForum with fondness. As Director of Information Services for the City of Augusta, ME, he attended the very first UniForum convention at Boston in 1978. He recalls that only about 60 attendees were present for a dinner and discussion. In fact, everyone fit into a fairly small dining area at the hotel. Instead of huge, 1,000 square-foot pavilions, each vendor had little spaces reserved around the edge of the room. He recalls seeing Bill Joy standing beside the Sun Microsystems exhibit, all of which fit on a folding card table.

Needless to say, times have changed. Today's UniForm conventions regularly attract 25,000 attendees. The convention and trade shows take up over 100,000 square feet of space in the country's largest convention halls. Talking to long-term UniForum members gives us a fascinating glimpse at where UniForm has been, where it's going, and how we have all benefitted from its activities.

When Anderberg attended the convention, he had just discovered Unix. He felt that the language would be ideal for the new applications he was writing for the city. The main problem was a lack of information. "In those days, I'd clip articles on Unix from the press, and maybe find a reference only once a week. There were very few articles, few books on the shelves."

UniForum became Anderberg's main source of technical information on Unix and Unix applications. "What I learned through UniForum was phenomenal," Anderberg says. "It was pretty lonely, being a commercial Unix site back in '78, particularly in Maine. A lot of the people I met through UniForum become contacts I could call afterwards and ask for help." Anderberg also mentioned that he was able to make "some pretty good decisions" at the convention about buying Unix applications in buying application, since he could talk to several vendors at the same time.

Anderberg's comments were echoed by another 15-year veteran, Edward Borkovsky, President, Unican Management Consultants, Thornhill, ON, Canada. "In the early days, UniForum was a beacon of light in the promotion of Unix and open systems," he says. "Anybody who was involved in the technology and believed in it was congregating around UniForum." Borkovsky explains that as a consultant dealing with open systems technology, UniForum gave him the chance to associate with the people who were actually making open systems a reality. With UniForum, he could always be informed of recent advances and participate in the technical development.

Borkovsky also mentions that UniNews and UniForum Monthly magazine supplied him with technical news and information he couldn't get anywhere else. "At the time, the press wasn't inclined to dedicate a lot of space to Unix issues," he says. "The publications were a good place to gather information." He adds that even now, when other channels of information have opened up, UniForum's publications remain valuable because of the special focus they bring to Unix and open systems issues.

When asked about the biggest changes they have witnessed over the years, many members cited the rise of the PC and the greater accessibility of computing. Mark G. Sobell, president of Sobell Associates, Menlo Park, CA, says "my four-year old son can pop in a CD and do things that were impossible just a few years ago." Borkovsky mentions the relative importance of software today as compared to hardware. "Before hardware was the important element. The industry has gone upside down in the past few years."

Despite these changes, members agreed that UniForum still provides them with benefits for their jobs, their businesses and their technical understanding. In this sense, says Anderberg, the Association reflects Unix itself. "When you think about it, Unix has stayed amazingly the same over the years," he says. "It's been an unusual area of stability amid the change."