[TUHS] Reorganising the Unix Archive? (GNU?)

Deborah Scherrer dscherrer at solar.stanford.edu
Tue Feb 21 04:37:33 AEST 2017


I was one of the 3 primary authors of the Software Tools system (along 
with Dennis Hall and Joe Sventek), and I was the founder of the users 
group.  (Also served a long time on the Usenix Board, was even president 
for a while.) Yes, the Georgia Tech stuff was from our system.   And, we 
expanded extensively beyond the tape that was available with the 
Kernighan/Plauger book.

I would be  pleased to contribute our code to the archive.  Thanks.

Deborah

On 2/20/17 10:27 AM, arnold at skeeve.com wrote:
> Hi Debborah.
>
> I don't know if we ever met but I certainly recognize your name
> from the Software Tools work.
>
> The original Ratfor and Pascal versions of the tools from the
> Kernighan and Plauger books are already in the archive, donated
> by yours truly many years ago. (They're from the tapes Addison Wesley
> would sell you at the time.)
>
> Nontheless, I think it would be WONDERFUL to have the enhanced
> tools you folks did in the archives.
>
> Please contribute them!
>
> Arnold
>
> P.S. I've asked before, but maybe there are more people around now...
>
> I was involved with the Georgia Tech subsystem for Pr1me computers which
> also built a very Unix like environment in an enhnaced Ratfor to run
> on top of Primos.  Some of the doc is archived, and I have some paper
> copies, but I'd love to see that code unearthed...
>
> I've made a very few bits that were ported to C are available under
> http://github.com/arnoldrobbins, and the 'se' editor has been revived
> by Thomas Cort at se-editor.org, but that's all in C.
>
> If anyone has a tape, I might have a program that could extract
> it under *nix.
>
> Thanks!
>
> Deborah Scherrer <dscherrer at solar.stanford.edu> wrote:
>
>> I would like to add the Software Tools to the Unix archive.  As you may
>> remember, Brian Kernighan and P. J. Plauger wrote a book about
>> developing Unix-like code for non-Unix systems.   We at the Lawrence
>> Berkeley Lab took that idea and ran with it.  We eventually produced a
>> set of Unix utilities and a system interface that could be reproduced on
>> virtually any operating system.  This was freely distributed and
>> eventually the package was put up on over 50 different
>> computers/systems.  There was a user group of about 2000. The movement
>> earned one of the Usenix Flame Awards, way back when.
>>
>> We have the original tapes produced at Lawrence Berkeley Lab, plus a
>> Pascal version, plus a version for CP/M.   We would like to add these to
>> the Unix archive, if you think it appropriate.
>>
>> Deborah





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