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Comment by pell | Hacker News Reader

Have you checked the Don Hopkins archive yet?

https://www.donhopkins.com/home/pub/

I have now, but (especially with the article part of the website now killed in favour of the execrable Medium) it took 'DVRC’s reply above for me to realize there was more to it than it first appeared: besides

https://www.donhopkins.com/home/pub/NeWS/

there’s also

https://www.donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/

https://www.donhopkins.com/home/archive/news-tape/

(take care that the news-tape subdirectory of the former is very similar but not identical to the latter)

and most notably

https://www.donhopkins.com/home/code/NeWS/

https://www.donhopkins.com/home/NeWS/

(these are not identical either),

while the correct place to look on Bitsavers is

https://bitsavers.org/bits/Sun/sunDistributionTapes/

Fun fact: originally "/home/NeWS" displayed "forbidden" access and I stumbled upon it by pure luck, finding the missing "operators.h" (and I told Don, since I wanted to see if there was something else missing or different, like "DumbOSI.c" which I hoped to be different from SunOSI.c). There is also an hidden file in /lib/NeWS called ".NeWS", contains the following string: "(hello) playdemo", which should kick the journal tool.

In any case, it was a "Pulcinella Secret", and anybody reading his replies on HN could easily find all his distributions, and it is replicated also on tenox.pdp-11.ru (but it's incomplete, since that there are only the contents of /home/code/NeWS".

On BitSavers there are the OpenWindows 2.0 source tapes other than the binaries (these last ones are also available inside SunOS 4.1.1 install CD, both for Sun-3 and Sun-4), but to extract them you need a specific tool, then you extract the tar dists.

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