was written in assembly language for the Lincoln Labs TX-2. Ivan has been asked by many people for the code and as far as I know he has never released it.
It, and several other significant pieces of software, including the SCALD hardware design language were made freely available by LLNL. I have one version of the compiler, which was donated to the Computer History Museum by one of its authors. I have been looking for the other pieces since the late 80's.
If you look at the GNU Manifesto, RMS was also looking at using the MIT Trix kernel in the early days of the project.
If you're in the SF Bay Area. If you aren't, take a look at the online exhibit to see how computing history can be made approachable to people unfamiliar with the field.
"I was under the impression that they had been given tot the Computer History Museum."
I've tried to find out what happened to them, without luck. Hopefully someone in facilities knew what they were and hid them somewhere. The prototypes in the lobby disappeared several years after the Apple Library was given away.
"when he became CEO of Apple in 1997, not only did he kill off a number of product lines and projects, he also donated Apple's large collection of historic products to the Computer History Museum."
He did no such thing. The contents of the Apple Library was given to Stanford University. The IL4 second floor was then taken over by Ive's group. With the exception of permission to release the MacPaint sources, CHM has never received anything from Apple, Inc.
The small exhibit of Apple products, including the Apple II prototype, disappeared from the IL4 internal lobby one day after Jobs was rumored to have said "get this shit out of here".
"Stop asking about media longevity and ask about file longevity." "don't think anymore in terms of reading from media, you think it terms of sending an NFS (or HTTP or whatever) request."
EXACTLY!
Now, where can I buy a system to do this that isn't wrapped up in some proprietary software mechanism? The only large-scale archival systems you can get today are sold by the likes of EMC for Sarbanes–Oxley compliance.
"how to preserve digital data for long periods of time."
The one advantage of digital data is that is is easy to make idential copies.
Make lots of copies, with redundant encoding and error checking Spread the copies in different physical locations. Migrate it to a new medium as necessary (bit density increases over time)
Depending on ANY single copy surviving and being able to be read at some point in the future makes no sense.
If you REALLY care about the data, you will spend the time to migrate it to newer media.
"User 460244 is talking gibberish and does not understand the problem" "The magnetization areas in floppies are way above the flux areal size limits." "You just read the analog signal from the heads"
Inductive heads only detect flux transitions. Are you proposing the use of a MR transducer, which can directly measure flux?
"You could just use a block compression algorithm."
Tell that to the people writing compression programs. As was mentioned further down in the replies, there doesn't seem to be any freely available software for creating distributed archives with redundancy and error correction. With the amount of data needing to be archived, and the lack of reliable storage media, I don't get this at all.
This is a totally non-obvious trick that I came across this past year for mitigating binder failure on floppies. Spray the surface with white board cleaner before you try to read them.
This should only be used as a last resort if you know that disks of a similar age and condition shed rapidly, and obviously clean the heads before and after you try this.
"Magnetic media like tapes and floppies use a binder (glue) that becomes corrupted with moisture over time, allowing the metal-oxide particles to flake off."
This isn't actually the hydroscopic failure mode of 1/2" computer tapes. The tape becomes sticky and will glue itself to the head if the tape ever stops moving, for example if the transport attempts to do a reread.
You need to bake computer tapes with a lot of airflow for the process to be effective. I have recovered thousands of tapes sucessfully this way.
This is a COMPLETELY different problem. There was no basic difficulty in recovering the flux transistions on the Cray disk pack, which is the problem that this guy has. If you can't get good sector data, you have no hope of recovering something that has been compressed without error correction built in. I'd be happy to hear about an error recovery process for corrupted ZIP archives.
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There are people that want this. Check on the 'controlfreaks' mailing list
controlfreaks@lists.controlfreaks.org
Don't scrap it.
Yes, that was where the disk pack came from; someone trying to build a Cray 1 in an FPGA.
That's what I do for a living
http://www.computerhistory.org/atchm/bit-by-bit-software-collecting/
Suggested this to Andy Rubin a couple of years ago.
Wonder if anyone has tried it.
was written in assembly language for the Lincoln Labs TX-2. Ivan has been asked by many people for the code and as far as I know he has never released it.
Here is a different perspective, posted today by the Computer History Museum. http://www.computerhistory.org/atchm/preservation-conservation-restoration-whats-the-difference/
You and everyone else. That is why almost none of these machines still exist.
thanks to www.bitsavers.org, NOT LCM (who uses bitsavers a LOT)
It was originally called HerdStar.
By Northhouse Associates / Compco in Milwaukee, circa 1978?
Lots of ex UW-Milwaukee CS friends worked there.
OSF1 and DCE would be of more interest than CDE/Motif at this point.
Look at the title of books and documentation from the period when they were in use. They
ALWAYS refer to them as PUNCHED cards.
Pastel was an extended Pascal compiler developed by LLNL for the S-1 supercomputer project
http://www.cs.clemson.edu/~mark/s1.html
It, and several other significant pieces of software, including the SCALD hardware design language
were made freely available by LLNL. I have one version of the compiler, which was donated to the
Computer History Museum by one of its authors. I have been looking for the other pieces since the
late 80's.
If you look at the GNU Manifesto, RMS was also looking at using the MIT Trix kernel in the early days
of the project.
What system did you end up going with?
How do you back it up?
If you're in the SF Bay Area. If you aren't, take a look at the online exhibit to see how
computing history can be made approachable to people unfamiliar with the field.
"I was under the impression that they had been given tot the Computer History Museum."
I've tried to find out what happened to them, without luck. Hopefully someone in facilities knew what they were and hid them somewhere.
The prototypes in the lobby disappeared several years after the Apple Library was given away.
"when he became CEO of Apple in 1997, not only did he kill off a number of product lines and projects, he also donated Apple's large collection of historic products to the Computer History Museum."
He did no such thing.
The contents of the Apple Library was given to Stanford University. The IL4 second floor was then taken over by Ive's group.
With the exception of permission to release the MacPaint sources, CHM has never received anything from Apple, Inc.
The small exhibit of Apple products, including the Apple II prototype, disappeared from the IL4 internal lobby one day after Jobs
was rumored to have said "get this shit out of here".
"Stop asking about media longevity and ask about file longevity."
"don't think anymore in terms of reading from media, you think it terms of sending an NFS (or HTTP or whatever) request."
EXACTLY!
Now, where can I buy a system to do this that isn't wrapped up in some proprietary software mechanism?
The only large-scale archival systems you can get today are sold by the likes of EMC for Sarbanes–Oxley compliance.
"how to preserve digital data for long periods of time."
The one advantage of digital data is that is is easy to make idential copies.
Make lots of copies, with redundant encoding and error checking
Spread the copies in different physical locations.
Migrate it to a new medium as necessary (bit density increases over time)
Depending on ANY single copy surviving and being able to be read at some point
in the future makes no sense.
If you REALLY care about the data, you will spend the time to migrate it
to newer media.
"User 460244 is talking gibberish and does not understand the problem"
"The magnetization areas in floppies are way above the flux areal size limits."
"You just read the analog signal from the heads"
Inductive heads only detect flux transitions. Are you proposing the use of a MR transducer, which can directly measure flux?
"You could just use a block compression algorithm."
Tell that to the people writing compression programs.
As was mentioned further down in the replies, there doesn't seem to be any freely available software
for creating distributed archives with redundancy and error correction. With the amount of data needing
to be archived, and the lack of reliable storage media, I don't get this at all.
This is a totally non-obvious trick that I came across this past year for mitigating binder failure
on floppies. Spray the surface with white board cleaner before you try to read them.
This should only be used as a last resort if you know that disks of a similar age and condition
shed rapidly, and obviously clean the heads before and after you try this.
"Magnetic media like tapes and floppies use a binder (glue) that becomes corrupted with moisture over time, allowing the metal-oxide particles to flake off."
This isn't actually the hydroscopic failure mode of 1/2" computer tapes. The tape becomes sticky and will glue itself to the head if the tape ever stops moving,
for example if the transport attempts to do a reread.
You need to bake computer tapes with a lot of airflow for the process to be effective. I have recovered thousands of tapes sucessfully this way.
This is a COMPLETELY different problem. There was no basic difficulty in recovering the flux transistions on the Cray disk pack,
which is the problem that this guy has.
If you can't get good sector data, you have no hope of recovering something that has been compressed without
error correction built in.
I'd be happy to hear about an error recovery process for corrupted ZIP archives.
don't
Legacy systems have 60Hz real-time clock interrupts derived from line voltage.
These sorts of systems are STILL IN USE.
As well as any AC powered LED clock module from the 70's.
Information sponsored by companies who have a genuine interest in adding to the historical record is preserved
History is written by the victors
Given that attitude, no software would survive from companies that have gone out of business, since there is nothing of commercial
value there.