http://www.mcjones.org/dustydecks Preserving historic software Fri, 25 Apr 2008 19:40:53 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Jérôme Chailloux recently told me about the wonderful ArtInfo-MusInfo web site, which contains a variety of documents produced by a group of "painters, musicians, psychologists, pedagogues, linguists, mathematicians, poets, architects and computer scientists gathered within the Computer Science Department of the University of Vincennes" during the period 1969-1980. Although there ... http://www.mcjones.org/dustydecks/archives/2008/02/23/67/ Last summer, ACM posted PDF versions of some books in its Classic Books Series, which resulted from a poll of ACM members initiated by David Patterson, who was then ACM President. The books are accessible to anyone who creates a free ACM Web Account. The available books include: ... http://www.mcjones.org/dustydecks/archives/2008/01/15/66/ MIT's MacLisp played a key role in Lisp history, but its documentation often lagged the system as developers concentrated on adding features and improving performance. Around the time that Lisp machine development eclipsed PDP-10 MacLisp, this final MacLisp document was published: Kent M. Pitman. The Revised MacLisp Manual. "Saturday ... http://www.mcjones.org/dustydecks/archives/2007/12/26/65/ This week's episode of BBC Radio's Digital Planet show includes a short segment on the 50th anniversary of Fortran. The presenter, Gareth Mitchell, interviewed me last week and about 4 minutes of that interview are included. If you're interested, the show will be broadcast at various times December 18 and 19 ... http://www.mcjones.org/dustydecks/archives/2007/12/18/64/ 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 ... http://www.mcjones.org/dustydecks/archives/2007/12/12/63/ 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 ... http://www.mcjones.org/dustydecks/archives/2007/06/11/61/ 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 ... http://www.mcjones.org/dustydecks/archives/2007/04/01/60/ 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! http://www.mcjones.org/dustydecks/archives/2007/02/16/59/ 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 ... http://www.mcjones.org/dustydecks/archives/2006/09/29/58/ 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 ... http://www.mcjones.org/dustydecks/archives/2006/08/14/57/ 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 ... http://www.mcjones.org/dustydecks/archives/2006/08/14/56/ An upcoming release of Bob Supnik's SIMH (Computer History Simulation system) will include IBM 704/709/7090/7094 simulation provided by Rich Cornwell. Rich has been very busy lately: implementing and debugging the simulations of the CPU, channels, controllers, and devices; tracking down and transcribing source code for diagnostics; and figuring out how ... http://www.mcjones.org/dustydecks/archives/2006/04/03/54/ I've added another important document to the Fortran I/Fortran II collection at the Computer History Museum: Anonymous. FORTRAN I, II, and 709 : Customer Engineering Manual of Instruction. IBM Corporation, Form R23-9518-0, February 1959, 67 pages. Copy belonging to Mark Halpern. PDF This document is filled with useful information for ... http://www.mcjones.org/dustydecks/archives/2006/03/19/52/ I just posted a scan of the three-volume listing of the IBM 704 FORTRAN II compiler to the History of FORTRAN and FORTRAN II web site at the Computer History Museum. This listing was donated to the Smithsonian National Museum of American History by Peter Z. Ingerman. When I last ... http://www.mcjones.org/dustydecks/archives/2006/02/01/50/ I have the pleasure of thanking ACM for granting permission to post the full texts of five ACM-copyrighted articles to the FORTRAN/FORTRAN II web site at the Computer History Museum. Here they are; for those already in the ACM Digital Library, we also link to the canonical ACM version ... http://www.mcjones.org/dustydecks/archives/2006/01/01/49/ I recently updated this item of the History of FORTRAN web site at the Computer History Museum to include an online copy of the video: FORTRAN 25th anniversary film, 1982, 12.5 minutes. Computer History Museum lot number X2843.2005, donated by Daniel N. Leeson. Windows Media Video (12.8 megabytes) (Daniel N. Leeson describes ... http://www.mcjones.org/dustydecks/archives/2005/11/19/48/ Brad Parker recently announced: After a long and interesting search I uncovered a set of 9-track tapes which appear to be a snapshot of the MIT CADR Lisp machine source code from around 1980. This is not the final source code and not the last source release I will make. It ... http://www.mcjones.org/dustydecks/archives/2005/10/04/47/ By comparing three versions of the memo (unsigned, but believed written by Irv Ziller) "Proposed Specifications for FORTRAN II for the 704", dated August 28, September 25, and November 18, 1957, you can watch the design of the subroutine feature of FORTRAN II unfold. The original FORTRAN system (see here ... http://www.mcjones.org/dustydecks/archives/2005/08/07/46/ Work on LISP spread from McCarthy's original M.I.T. project to other projects at M.I.T. and then to other institutions as people moved on and word about the capabilities of the language spread. John Allen brought a snapshot of the M.I.T.'s PDP-6 LISP to Stanford where it evolved into Stanford LISP ... http://www.mcjones.org/dustydecks/archives/2005/07/24/45/ With the permission of The MIT Press, I have posted online copies of two classic LISP books on the History of Lisp website at the Computer History Museum: John McCarthy, Paul W. Abrahams, Daniel J. Edwards, Timothy P. Hart and Michael I. Levin. LISP 1.5 Programmer's Manual. The M.I.T. Press, 1962, ... http://www.mcjones.org/dustydecks/archives/2005/07/10/44/