The following messages are artifacts from a community that did what we now call "open source development", without ever having heard of OSI or the FSF, without any experience with Unix, without access to the internet, and most of all without Larry Wall's "patch" program.
These are examples WWIV .MOD files, changes to the WWIV bulletin board software. These were traded through WWIVnet, a store-and-forward network consisting of individual WWIV bulletin boards periodically dialing each other to exchange/forward messages and email. The WWIV modding community was at its' height in 1993, just before the "september that never ended" when NSF backbone policy changed to allow for-profit dialup ISPs to connect to the internet.
A generation of programmers learned C programming by following instructions like these.
I got these from ftp://archives.thebbs.org/wwiv_utils/422mods.zip