Unix Mailing Lists, Chats, and Similar Resources

Introduction

This article lists Unix-oriented mailing lists, chats, and other resources that you can read or join to, over time, gain more thorough familiarity and insight into Unix.

Resources are listed roughly in the order of engagement required, from passive ones such as mailing list subscriptions, to moderately demanding ones such as documents and videos to read, to active tasks and projects you can participate in.

Most resources listed are serious, with occasional humorous ones.

This Website

Make sure to read other articles from this website, https://crystallabs.io/, that may be of interest and are generally conducive to becoming more familiar with Unix.

TUHS and COFF Mailing Lists

TUHS and COFF are two old-school Unix-related mailing lists hosted at www.tuhs.org's mailman.

TUHS is intended for Unix-related topics only, while COFF is more of an accompanying, off-topic list.

The lists have been run by Warren Toomey and have brought him a 2022 USENIX Lifetime Achievement Award. Warren’s motivation for running the lists can be read in his blog post Why Did I Start the Unix Heritage Society?. An interview with him related to the USENIX award can be read in Usenix’ Interview with Warren Toomey.

The subscription method for these two lists is non-standard, in the sense that there is no publicly-accessible subscription form. You need to send an email to wkt(AT)tuhs(DOT)org with the content similar to:

“Hello Warren, please subscribe me to the TUHS and COFF mailing lists. My email address is …, thanks.”

Notes:

1. Please be aware these lists are not for the faint of heart. Many members were prominent in the Unix community in the ’70s, ’80s, and onwards. These lists are a very interesting place to read past or current comments from a number of people that would otherwise be hard to meet or hear from in other venues.

2. Your presence on those lists should primarily be oriented towards reading, respecting, and learning, not posting messages. Various on- and off-topic stories on those lists will be quite interesting. However, be aware of members’ subjective perspectives and memory, and apply judgement – sometimes, incorrect claims will be made and pass by uncorrected.

3. From time to time, list members will post unusually opinionated, uninformed, or hateful comments, usually in relation to things and people that came after Unix. For everyone’s benefit, such comments should be ignored, while still appreciating the periods on the Unix timeline in which the authors did meaningfully participate.

RISKS Mailing List

RISKS Digest or “Forum On Risks to the Public in Computers and Related Systems” is an online periodical published since 1985 by the Committee on Computers and Public Policy of the Association for Computing Machinery. It is edited by Peter G. Neumann.

The RISKS homepage is available at https://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/ and the mailing list is available at https://lists.csl.sri.com/mailman/listinfo/risks.

The subscriptions to the list are done in the usual way, from the GNU Mailman interface linked above.

CRYPTO-GRAM Mailing List

Bruce Schneier is publishing CRYPTO-GRAM, a free monthly newsletter providing summaries, analyses, insights, and commentaries on security: computer and otherwise.

Archives and subscription features are available at https://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram/.

Internet History Mailing List (IH)

A low-traffic mailing list, dedicated to questions and clarifications about Internet history, is available at https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history.

Old Computer Ads Mailing List

There are two mailing lists dedicated to old computer ads, Computer Ads from the Past and Vintage Computer Ads.

SP&E Journal and Mailing List

Software: Practice and Experience is an international journal discussing tools and practices for software systems and applications.

It was started in 1971, and is issued monthly. Many articles are available as PDFs without an institutional subscription. There is a mailing list available on the website to receive notifications of new articles and issues.

A.Word.A.Day Mailing List (AWAD)

Non IT-related, there is an Internet service delivering one new English word and its dictionary definition to your email daily, available at https://wordsmith.org/.

Its mailing list is available at https://wordsmith.org/awad/ (A.Word.A.Day).

Linux Weekly News (LWN.net)

LWN.net is a website with an emphasis on Linux, free software, and Unix. It features daily stories and news, weekly issues, and threaded discussions below every post. Most daily news are short summaries of articles published elsewhere and are free to all viewers.

LWN’s original articles are usually published weekly on Thursdays and are available only to subscribers during the first two weeks, after which they become free as well.

LWN caters to a more technical audience than other Linux/free software publications. It is often praised for its in-depth coverage of Linux kernel internals and Linux kernel mailing list (LKML) discussions.

UNIX Guru Universe (UGU)

Unix Guru Universe (UGU) is an old and mostly unmaintained (but still available) website with various Unix-related information.

The site may be of relatively little use these days, but at least the following resources on it are interesting:

• Daily UGU Unix tips, which you can also subscribe to and receive via email. Please note that due to UGU being an old-school website and not all tips being peer-reviewed, some tips will be obsolete, suboptimal, or just plain wrong! Beware. On the flip side, there are some great ones too.

  For example, Tip #4537 would work in simple scenarios, but cause serious negative consequences in others due to incorrect use of * and $i expansions. The right way to do what the author intended would have been to use the program mmv or a safe command find ... -exec mv {} {}.bak \;.

• Daily UGU excuses, which you can use whenever you need a new excuse. This resource is somewhat similar to the style of legendary BOFH excuses or Unix fortunes.

• Usenix Playing Cards, which is a copy of the 1994-issued deck of playing cards, created by The USENIX Association. The commemorative card deck was created to honor UNIX contributors on the occasion of Unix’ 25th Anniversary, and features one contributor on each card. The images are not clickable; instead, people should be clicked from the dedicated page with the list of Unix contributors (see below).

• UGU List of Unix Contributors, giving names and short descriptions of people that contributed to Unix, mostly in the early days.

HCoop.Net

Internet Hosting Cooperative (HCoop), Inc. is a non-profit corporation established in 2002, offering GNU/Linux accounts for $7/mo per account. Interested individuals can pledge to pay more per month to support the organization.

HCoop operates a proper GNU/Linux infrastructure based on Kerberos and OpenAFS. It is probably the only public service offering accounts based on the OpenAFS distributed filesystem.

If you are interested in trying out OpenAFS yourself, you can read my article OpenAFS Installation on Debian/Ubuntu/Devuan.

Among other services available to HCoop members are shell, DNS, web, email hosting, databases, chat, and more.

Many HCoop members are technically skilled.

This is the right place to join if you are interested in an online GNU/Linux-based account backed by a distributed file system AFS.

SDF / Lonestar.org

SDF is a non-profit public access UNIX shell provider that has been in continual operation since 1987.

Its infrastructure is based on NetBSD. In 2016 it had about 50K users and was the largest NetBSD installation in the world.

SDF also also provides many retrocomputing environments.

This is the right place to join if you are interested in an online BSD-based account.

Unix50.Org

For the celebration of the 50th anniversary of the creation of Unix and the 32nd anniversary of the establishment of the SDF Public Access Unix System, a collection of simulated historical Unix systems was prepared for visitors’ exploration and entertainment.

The website is https://unix50.org/, and instructions for using it are on https://sdf.org/?tutorials/unix50th.

Unix50 provides live access to 10 historical Unix releases and is an excellent option for quickly checking the history (availability and actual behavior!) of many Unix commands.

Access to even more (non-Unix) systems is available with details on https://sdf.org/?ssh.

Internet Relay Chat (IRC)

Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is a system for instant messaging. It was designed for group communication that takes place in so-called “channels”, enabled by one or more networked IRC servers. It also allows one-on-one communication via private messages, as well as switching to a direct client-to-client (DCC) communication for chats and file sharing.

IRC is accessed via IRC clients, such as the graphical HexChat, Pidgin, KVIrc, or mIRC, or textual ircII and irssi. There is a large number of IRC clients available, which can be seen in the comparison of Internet Relay Chat clients.

The biggest IT-related IRC networks operated today are Libera Chat and Open and Free Technology Community (OFTC).

If you are unable to install an IRC client, both Libera and OFTC websites offer web-based IRC clients at https://web.libera.chat/ and https://webchat.oftc.net/.

IRC networks are nowadays often a target of spammers, intent on getting their nonsensical messages displayed to as many users as possible. That has prompted many IRC channels to start requiring users to be authenticated (registered with an email address and password, and logged in) before they could either join channels or post their own messages.

As a result, as one of the first things after joining an IRC network, you will most likely want to run /msg nickserv help to receive instructions on registering your username (called a “nickname”) on that network.

You should become a regular IRC user on the Libera Chat and Open and Free Technology Community (OFTC) networks. After registering and logging in, run /list to receive the list of existing channels which you can join and add to your auto-join list.

Misc Websites

Unspecific collection of Unix-aware websites:

• https://www.wired.com/

• https://www.arstecnica.com/

• https://www.phoronix.com/