This is a good example. C made the transition from "hot new platform" to "infrastructural millstone" before conferences on trendy programming topics were a thin

This is a good example. C made the transition from "hot new platform" to "infrastructural millstone" before conferences on trendy programming topics were a thing. The original Bourne Shell was written in an odd preprocessed dialect of C called "Bournegol". I'm sure this was analogous to the kind of innovative techniques people present at conferences today. http://oldhome.schmorp.de/marc/bournegol.html http://oldhome.schmorp.de/marc/bournegol.html Maybe someone else can comment authoritatively on how ideas and techniques were disseminated in the early days if Unix and C. My guess is that it happened through listservs and Usenet, thus reaching even isolated Unix installations who wouldn't have been funded to attend a central conference, if that had been thought of. In Ireland I know that in the 70s there were local meetings of DECUS, for users of Digital Equipment Corp hardware and software. I don't know about Unix.