[TUHS] What's with the DZ-11?

[jnc@mercury.lcs.mit.edu (Noel Chiappa)]

    > From: Dave Horsfall <dave at horsfall.org>

    > a 9-track tape followed me home, but even if I knew where it was now it
    > ain't gonna be readable after over 30 years...

Umm, don't be too sure!

I have several sets of backup tapes from one of the V6 machines at MIT, and
those are also roughly 30 years old, and they are not in the best shape (they
sat in my basement for most of that time). I sent one off to someone who
specializes in reading old tapes, and he's gotten almost all the bits off of
it (a few records had unrecoverable read errors, but the vast majority were
OK - like roughly 15 read errors in around 1500 records).

So do look for that tape (unless the material is all already online).

I hope to annouce a vast trove of stuff soon from my tapes (once I figure out
how to interpret the bits - they are written by a sui generis application
called 'saveRVD', and the _only_ documentation of how it did it is... on that
tape! :-) That includes a lot of code written at MIT, as well as stuff
from elsewhere.

Coming sbould be BCPL, Algol, LISP and some other languages; MACRO-11 and the
DEC linker (which I guess are also available from UNSW tapes),but _also_
programs to convert back and forth from .REL to a.out format, and to .LDA
format; and a whole ton of other applications (I have no idea what all is
there - if anyone is interested, I can make a pass through my manuals and try
and make a list).

	Noel