Along those lines....

I once heard about a paper that was presented at some conference titled something along the lines of, "My Goodness: It Still Runs?!". The topic was some sort of early version of Unix running on some ancient piece of hardware doing some sort of industrial control. When I heard about it, a notable part of the paper was a mention that it was believed they had removed all bugs from the implementation.

Not quite a lost version of Unix, but almost a lost+found version. Has anyone else heard of this paper? Perhaps it is apocryphal? I've always wanted to read it, but never found a copy "in the wild."

- Dan C.

On Wed, Jan 4, 2017 at 4:24 PM, ron minnich <rminnich@gmail.com> wrote:

So there are a few ports I know of that I wonder if they ever made it back into that great github repo.I don't think they did.

harris
gould
That weird BBN 20-bit machine
(20 bits? true story: 5 4-bit modules fit in a 19" rack. So 20 bits)
Alpha port (Tru64)
Precision Architecture
Unix port to Cray vector machines

others? What's the list of "lost machines" look like? Would companies consider a donation, do you think?

If that Cray port is of any interest I have a thread I can push on maybe.

but another true story: I visited DEC in 2000 or so, as LANL was about to spend about $120M on an Alpha system. The question came up about the SRM firmware for Alpha. As it was described to me, it was written in BLISS and the only machine left that could build it was an 11/750, "somewhere in the basement, man, we haven't turned that thing on in years". I suspect there's a lot of these containing oxide oersteds of interest.

ron