> On Jun 22, 2021, at 5:43 PM, ben via cctech <cct...@classiccmp.org> wrote:
>
> ...
> 1965 to 1985 generated most of the new computing languages,operating
> systems and ideas. Sadly most of it seems lost source code wise.
> Ben.
I might push the start of that back to 1955, but apart from that I agree you
have a good point.
There's actually a surprising amount of preserved material. The SIMH project
has been a very impressive help with that, as is Bitsavers. Then there is
Hercules and DtCyber, to mention just two classic architectures preserved in
emulators -- and each of these comes with a substantial body of operating
systems and languages.
The famous THE system has been preserved. The first ever ALGOL-60 compiler
also (more precisely, the third, load and go, version of that compiler -- but
that was a small incremental change not affecting the essential structure).
Both in source form, and both run in emulation. The same goes for Multics, and
OS/360, and CDC COS and Scope and Kronos, and Burroughs mainframe MCP. There
is a collection of PDP-1 software, and IBM 1620 software, and so on. You can
still run APL\360 as it existed on the IBM 360 mainframes, and you can
experience the PLATO system just as it was in the late 1970s (for that, see
cyber1.org).
For most of this the source code still exists, though I'm not sure about the
1620 bits. So you aren't limited to playing with it, you can study the code,
in as much depth as you care to. Some have gone deep enough to get a Ph.D. for
their work (Gauthier van den Hove's extremely detailed analysis of that first
ALGOL compiler).
Of course there's also a lot that has vanished. The machine on which I learned
assembly language seems to have vanished from history except for one sales
pamphlet (the Philips PR8000). Software of the MC (CWI) research machines is
pretty much gone, which is quite unfortunate since one of them is an ARMAC demo
program written by Dijkstra containing his original implementation of the
"shortest path" algorithm that later became the essence of several Internet
routing protocols.
paul
