There was no era without free or open source software. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_free_and_open-source_software#Free_software_before_the_1980s ht

There was no era without free or open source software. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_free_and_open-source_software#Free_software_before_the_1980s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_free_and_open-sourc... > In the 1950s and into the 1960s almost all software was produced by academics and corporate researchers working in collaboration, often shared as public-domain software. ... > The first example of free and open-source software is believed to be the A-2 system, developed at the UNIVAC division of Remington Rand in 1953,[5] which was released to customers with its source code. ... > Some free software which was developed in the 1970s continues to be developed and used, such as TeX (developed by Donald Knuth)[8] and SPICE.[9] You should also recall that software wasn't considered copyrightable before the 1974: > Therefore, software had no licenses attached and was shared as public-domain software, typically with source code. The CONTU decision plus later court decisions such as Apple v. Franklin in 1983 for object code, gave computer programs the copyright status of literary works and started the licensing of software and the shrink-wrap closed source software business model.