Restoration of 1st Edition Unix kernel sources

Anyone interested in this should definitely read the description of a lot related work of recovery in the excellent paper by Warren Toomey on the restoration of early UNIX artifacts. There was a lot more involved than just doing an OCR scan of old documents, it is really impressive. http://www.usenix.org/events/usenix09/tech/full_papers/toome...

Back in April 2006, the great Al Kossow of Bitsavers uncovered some unknown papers and documented his findings on The Unix Heritage Society mailing list:

"Preliminary Relase of UNIX Implentation Document" -> http://minnie.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/2006-April/001367.html

The files -> http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/bellLabs/unix/

For as strange as it may sound, this amazing finding went unnoticed for 2 years. Nobody paid any attention to this precious paper...until April 2008. That's when the whole restoration process really started:

"Whence 1st Edition Unix Kernel Assembly?" -> http://minnie.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/2008-April/001695.html

There was a mailing list specially dedicated to the whole restauration process:

"The Unix-jun72 Archives" -> http://minnie.tuhs.org/pipermail/unix-jun72/

It was really an impressive effort for bringing back to life the first edition of the operating system that forever changed the computer world.

What a really great example of Vinge's software archeology! I've felt that way on some projects, but obviously nothing like this.

Also of interest: http://www.tuhs.org/

Link to the Caldera license doesn't seem to work. Otherwise, very cool!

Would be nice if this ran in the browser, if only to avoid bitrot.

Fabulous!

For anyone interested in this kind of archaeology I have put together a web interface for the 1st Edition manual pages:

http://man.cat-v.org/unix-1st/