The Computer History Museum has just launched a partnership with YouTube to provide a ComputerHistory “channel”. Right now it has 23 videos from various events and lectures at the museum; if you subscribe (via the orange button), you’ll be notified when more are uploaded. In the mean time, the museum maintains a calendar of past [...]
Observant audience members at Bjarne Stroustrup’s HOPL-III C++ talk this past weekend may have noticed on the last slide a mention of the C++ Historical Sources Archive at the Computer History Museum. This is a project Bjarne and I have been working on in the background for a year or two. Bjarne convinced the appropriate [...]
As an undergraduate at the University of California at Berkeley in the late 1960s, I first learned of John Backus and his work on Fortran, BNF, and Algol. Around 1972 or 1973 I attended a talk John gave on “variable-free programming” at Berkeley. I was fascinated by programming languages (having worked on implementations of Snobol4, [...]
This blog is now running on WordPress 2.1. I’d like to thank the friendly staff at my ISP, meer.net, for moving my account to a new server with PHP 4.1.21.
Please let me (paul at mcjones dot org) know if you observe any problems with this blog. Thanks!
Many people know of Al Kossow through his work on bitsavers.org, which I mentioned in a previous post. I’m very pleased to mention here Al’s recent appointment as the Robert N. Miner Software Curator at the Computer History Museum. Al is off to a great start on a variety of efforts including reading old magnetic [...]
Tom Rindfleisch kindly supplied a set of TENEX Interlisp files from a system dump of the SUMEX-AIM <lisp> directory as of January 31, 1982. Tom notes:
This version of Interlisp should be both TENEX and TOPS20 compatible. It came at a time when lots of work was going on to port Interlisp to other environments, including [...]
Rich Cornwell (some of whose work I reported on earlier) and Bob Abeles (who was the first to point out to me the existence of the Fortran II sources) have recently completed a reconstruction of the card deck for the “Bonnie’s Birthday Assembly” of Lisp 1.5 (see Pascal Bourguignon recreates machine-readable source for LISP 1.5). Rich notes:
Bob Abeles has [...]
I recently upgraded the WordPress server this blog runs on from version 1.2 to version 1.5, which has many internal improvements, and I decided to switch to a new visual “theme” rather than figure out how to upgrade the one I was using to work with the new server. Please let me know if [...]
My name is Paul McJones. I am using this weblog to discuss historic computer software and hardware among other topics. For several months I’ve been studying the early history of Fortran, and trying to track down the source code for the original Fortran compiler. Although I just set up this weblog recently [...]