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 media, etc. He asked me to post this item about an important recent development:
In the spring of this year, the Computer History Museum was contacted by someone who had several SDS 900 series machines, and told us that he had the entire SDS software library from Honeywell in the early 80’s.
The donation arrived at CHM on Friday, and I’ve spent the past few days going through it. It does, in fact contain ALMOST the entire collection as it existed at Honeywell in March, 1982. Unfortunately, the 940 timesharing system software was already gone from the library by 1982. Two 940 archive tapes, a set of user programs and the off-line diagnostics have survived.
There is a very large collection of user’s manuals, program writeups, paper and magnetic tape. This is the largest software collection that has survived largely in one piece from a 60’s computer manufacturer that I’ve ever seen.
Scans of most of the program library listings are on line now at bitsavers under pdf/sds/9xx/programLibrary. I’m in the process of post-processing several dozen programming and other user’s manuals.
There are about 100 7-track tapes which will have to wait until I have a reliable way to read them. The smaller program library programs were written to 9-track tape in 1982, and those have been successfully read and a machine-readable index of their contents have been started.
Do you know anyone who may have worked for computer companies in the 60’s or 70’s that was a pack rat? The companies themselves have either disappeared or discarded this stuff literally decades ago!
This discovery has reinforced my opinion that there may still be large archives of 60’s and 70’s software in the hands of individuals, and that the most important thing to do is to get the word out that CHM is committed to the preservation of these archives, and has the facilities to recover these latent archives and keep them for posterity.
So if you are one of these people or you know one of them, please contact Al.