[TUHS] Early Internet work

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

    > From: Nick Downing

    > is it possible for you to read the other tapes also?

Hi, we just read the second tape, which read without error. It appears to be
mostly the same stuff as the first, except that for some not-now-understood
reason, a lot of the sub-directories in /src/src (the directory that held most
of the sources) weren't there on the _first_ tape, but _are_ there on the
_second_.  So at this point we have access to everything that was on that
machine.

It's too long a list to go through, but here:

  http://ana-3.lcs.mit.edu/~jnc/tech/pdp11/tmp/csr2_edfiles.txt

is an edited list of the files on the machine. Most of /usr/ has been deleted,
since it contains a lot of personal files, the names of which I don't wish to
make public.

Alas, some of the code (e.g. the much of the MIT TCP/IP) was in some personal
directories; it will take me a while to curate all that.


Also, this machine did not contain everything that was done at MIT: one
particularly saddening lacuna is that the Algol-60 (written for the 'Intro to
programming for CS majors' course, 6.031 to those for whom that means
anything) isn't there, along with its documentation. With that being _such_ an
incredibly influential language, I'd really wanted to see a PDP-11 version
made available.

There's also an APL, and some missing subdirectories in the BCPL source
directory ('henke', 'richards' and 'tenex'). Etc, etc.

I have reached out to people at MIT, to see if a tape backup from the machine
where all that was can be found; I will keep you all posted if anything shows
up.


    > I would be particularly interested in the early 8080 compiler

Yes, that's there ('c8080'), but object-only - it may have been something that was
purchased from an outside vendor. There does seem like there might be an 8080-back
end for the BCPL compiler.

    Noel