ABSTRACT

The Conservatoire national des arts et metiers is a higher education establishment based in Paris. It was created in the wake of the French Revolution in 1794 to stimulate industrial innovation, and has been since a privileged public institution for applied research and continuous education in the technological field. The loose, informal structure of the Unixian community is key to understanding the spread of a technical network based on the social values of openness and cooperation. Unix networks emerged in cooperation but also in competition with other networks of computers. In the 1970s, they were mostly centralized and proprietary. The Arpanet and Unix appeared complementary for the spread of computer internetworking technologies throughout the 1980s, because the system was compatible with many machines present on the international network. From the start, Unixians were part of the self-perceived digital avant-garde willing to create new institutions supported by an “electronic democracy”.