[TUHS] Re: [tuhs] Early statistical software in Unix

[TUHS] Re: [tuhs] Early statistical software in Unix

[Nelson H. F. Beebe]

Doug McIlroy kindly sent me contact information for John Chambers,
co-author of the cited book about the S system.  I have just heard
back from John, who offered a link to his summary paper from the
2020 HOPL conference proceedings

	S, R, and data science
	https://doi.org/10.1145/3386334

and reported that S was licensed to AT&T Unix customers only in binary
form, and that the original source code may no longer exist.

That is a definitive answer, even if not the one that I was hoping to
find.

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- University of Utah                                                          -
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[TUHS] Re: [tuhs] Early statistical software in Unix

[James Frew]

Well, at least one copy of the source code escaped: I compiled and ran 
it on a Sun-3 server at UCSB ca. 1980. As I recall it was a formidable 
wad of Fortran. Alas, it's long gone: any backups extant would be on 
media likely too deteriorated to read, even if we had the hardware to 
read it.

Cheers,
/Frew

On 2024-06-11 10:42, Nelson H. F. Beebe wrote:

> Doug McIlroy kindly sent me contact information for John Chambers,
> co-author of the cited book about the S system.  I have just heard
> back from John, who offered a link to his summary paper from the
> 2020 HOPL conference proceedings
>
> 	S, R, and data science
> 	https://doi.org/10.1145/3386334
>
> and reported that S was licensed to AT&T Unix customers only in binary
> form, and that the original source code may no longer exist.
>
> That is a definitive answer, even if not the one that I was hoping to
> find.

[TUHS] Re: [tuhs] Early statistical software in Unix

[Ralph Corderoy]

Hi Nelson,

> [John] reported that S was licensed to AT&T Unix customers only in
> binary form, and that the original source code may no longer exist.

Given your point about ‘S’ being an awkward search term, does John
Chambers recall a colloquial longer name, perhaps for when context was
needed?  Also, any fragments of filenames he can recall, whether source
or binary distribution.

Given Bell Labs long history of inventions, it presumably had an archive
of material and an archivist or librarian back in the '70s.  Back then,
contemporary data on disc and tape was impractical to archive — too much
of it, to expensive to duplicate, and difficult to predict what would be
worth keeping — but paper was their trade.  An archival print of source
to match a licensed release would have been possible.  Perhaps even
preferred by the lawyers.  I'm surprised they weren't considering how to
archive ‘today’.

-- 
Cheers, Ralph.