The first FLOSS I ever contributed to was 2.11B News, the standard Usenet software of the day, back in 1985 or so. I ran a Eunice system (a kludge that ran Unix on top of VMS) for a startup, and wanted to get us on Usenet; earlier I had a job at a Navy lab that was on the ARPAnet and felt cut off. Larry Wall (himself) had done some Eunice patches for an earlier version, and I ported them to work on the new system. The only tricky part was faking links, since Eunice didn't support them. 300 baud modems and magnetic tapes by mail were the only way to move your data around.