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mycroftiv
Anyone interested in this should definitely read the description of a lot related work of recovery in the excellent paper by Warren Toomey on the restoration of early UNIX artifacts. There was a lot more involved than just doing an OCR scan of old documents, it is really impressive. http://www.usenix.org/events/usenix09/tech/full_papers/toome...
gord
Would be nice if this ran in the browser, if only to avoid bitrot.
caf
The (long, long) pre-standard C that it's written in isn't even understood by modern C compilers - bitrot is pretty much a given at this point.
sliverstorm
They recovered a working compiler, and the darn thing was recovered from a printout- it's not that long. Portable, perhaps?
caf
I meant "long pre-standard" as in it pre-dates the C standard by a long time.
SoftwareMaven
What a really great example of Vinge's software archeology! I've felt that way on some projects, but obviously nothing like this.
cpeterso
Another Vernor Vinge concept I love is the "software midden heap", layers of software standing on the shoulders of and papering over the bugs of earlier software. Will anyone be able to excise rotting middle layers without breaking software compatibility?

For example, Vinge's A DEEPNESS IN THE SKY describes a software system thousands of years in the future that still uses the time_t epoch (and none of the system's space-faring users know the significance of 01970-01-01).

StephenFalken
Back in April 2006, the great Al Kossow of Bitsavers uncovered some unknown papers and documented his findings on The Unix Heritage Society mailing list:

"Preliminary Relase of UNIX Implentation Document" -> http://minnie.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/2006-April/001367.html

The files -> http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/bellLabs/unix/

For as strange as it may sound, this amazing finding went unnoticed for 2 years. Nobody paid any attention to this precious paper...until April 2008. That's when the whole restoration process really started:

"Whence 1st Edition Unix Kernel Assembly?" -> http://minnie.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/2008-April/001695.html

There was a mailing list specially dedicated to the whole restauration process:

"The Unix-jun72 Archives" -> http://minnie.tuhs.org/pipermail/unix-jun72/

It was really an impressive effort for bringing back to life the first edition of the operating system that forever changed the computer world.