pmcjones

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43468959

The Dream Machine by M. Mitchell Waldrop

Computing in the Middle Ages by Severo Ornstein - https://worrydream.com/refs/Ornstein_2002_-_Computing_in_the...

I visited the Mill in the mid-1980s. There was still a smell of lanolin in the stairwells.

Or every billionaire will want a world leader?

There's currently no way other than crawling the web site. The HTML and PDF files are intermingled with the original files.

(I'm the author of the blog post, walkthrough, and archive.)

At the end of the article are two links: https://xeroxalto.computerhistory.org/index.html https://xeroxalto.computerhistory.org/xerox_alto_file_system...

The first is the actual archive; the second is a "walkthrough" with pointers to various interesting things.

(I'm the author of the blog post, walkthrough and archive. Al Kossow was responsible for rescuing the files in the first place.)

As far as I know, sabbaticals were universal.

But C was better because it incorporated byte addressing (BCPL was based on word addresses).

For a look at how BCPL developed (by being easily ported to new machines), see: https://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/BCPL

In particular, one of the projects that Steve Bourne had previously done is the Algol68C compiler at Cambridge. See: https://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/ALGOL/algol68i...

Actually you can set up a good approximation using iPhoneOS>Settings>Accessibility>Audio & Visual>Headphone Accommodations. Under Custom Audio Setup, you can select a audiogram, such as produced by an app like Mimi, or scanned in from your audiologist.

You can sync your own MP3s using iTunes Match -- it's about $25/year. https://support.apple.com/en-us/108935

More early history about System R, DB2, and some related systems here:

The 1995 SQL Reunion: People, Projects, and Politics https://mcjones.org/System_R/SQL_Reunion_95/

DB2 was not part of OS/400 -- it was for MVS. Its early history is covered in this: https://mcjones.org/System_R/SQL_Reunion_95/index.html

I still use Picasa on Windows, but its cloud features (uploading and mapping) don’t work anymore.

Many were at his Living Computers Museum, and had been restored and available to the public. But he'd only loaned them to the museum, so now his estate is selling them off.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Living_Computers:_Museum_+_Lab...

Evans Hall [0] on the UC Berkeley campus is a brutalist building completed in 1971. My friends and I watched for many months as a steady stream of cement trucks drove up Hearst Avenue; we joked about how there would eventually be a similar stream of dump trucks carrying away the refuse when it was demolished. Little did I know that would probably be in my lifetime -- see [1]. For 1971 views from the balcony of my then second-floor Evans office, see photos 3 through 7 of [2] (the final two photos were taken inside that office).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evans_Hall_(UC_Berkeley)

[1] https://www.dailycal.org/archives/tends-to-stick-out-evans-h...

[2] https://caltss.computerhistory.org/image/campus-1971/index.h...

SQL/DS was actually a slightly reworked System R, the research system that invented SQL. And the original DB2 relational layer was reworked from System R. See: https://www.mcjones.org/System_R/SQL_Reunion_95/index.html

A SNOBOL4 implementation that Charles Simonyi and I did during 1968-1969, and a revised version, 1971-1972.

More StarLisp items: https://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/LISP/parallel#...

Also the New OED project: https://cs.uwaterloo.ca/~fwtompa/newoed-project.html

I worked for Jack Perrine at Athena Programming on the Fortran V runtime as a student intern my senior year in high school (1967). In 2011 he donated a number of manuals and listings of the compiler to the Computer History Museum:

https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/search/?s=perrin...

The 8087 was also designed there. (Professor William Kahan was a consultant who worked with the Intel team and provided key algorithms.)

The paper notes: "Thus, an annual conference called 'Computers and Their Applications' was organized. It is interesting to note that the third edition of that conference, held in 1961, featured lectures by professors John McCarthy, Marvin L. Minsky6, and Harold V. McIntosh [9]." That conference was also known as the First International LISP Conference -- see https://mcjones.org/dustydecks/the-first-international-lisp-...

And here is Paul Kimpel's story about how he got that compiler running (or at least limping) on his B205 emulator: https://datatron.blogspot.com/2015/11/knuths-algol-58-compil...

Here's a tech report Gordon wrote:

Out of a Closet: The Early Years of Years of The Computer [X] Museums https://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=147...

And here's a website he created to capture the history of the original Computer Museum(s) at DEC and then Boston:

https://tcm.computerhistory.org

I beat the bushes for the source code, documenting my finds (https://mcjones.org/dustydecks/archives/category/lisp/) and posting them (https://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/LISP/lisp15_fa...), but the early work was done by Jack Harper, Pascal Bourguignon, Rich Cornwell and Bob Abeles, Andru Luvisi, Angelo Papenhoff, Al Kossow, and others.

Mike Schuster, who by the way is a superb programmer.

Adobe has the only copy, and they have donated early versions of PostScript (https://computerhistory.org/blog/postscript-a-digital-printi...) and Photoshop; people should ask Adobe to release more. Everything I find in the public domain I post at https://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects .

In the aughts I worked at Adobe and spent time trying to archive the source code for Photoshop, Illustrator, PostScript, and other apps. Thomas Knoll's original Mac floppy disk backups were available, so I brought in my Mac Plus, with a serial cable to transfer the files to a laptop via Kermit. The first version was 0.54, dated 6 July 1988. The files on the floppies were in various ancient compressed archive formats, but most were readable. I created an archive on a special Perforce server of all the code that I found. Sadly, the earliest Illustrator backups were on a single external disk drive that had gone bad.