The Software Preservation Group (SPG) of the Computer History Museum is exploring how to collect software in support of the museum's overall mission.

The work of the SPG includes:

   Preserving and collecting software
   Identifying and working with other people preserving and collecting software
   Sponsoring and assisting software preservation and collection activity

This web site is used to:

   communicate and coordinate the activities of the SPG
   display the works-in-progress
   solicit assistance from potential volunteers and collaborators

Use the tabs above to find information about the SPG, our current projects, SPG meetings, and how you can help.

More Taste: Less Greed?
or
Sending UNIX to the Fat Farm

C H Forsyth

Can also be found on the authors' site http://www.terzarima.net/doc/taste.pdf
Department of Computer Science
University of York

Timeline of Unix and Unix-like operating systems and related technology.

A listing of ITS 1.0 3/19/67 has been scanned 2023-12, see https://gunkies.org/wiki/ITS_138 and https://github.com/PDP-6/ITS-138/tree/master/ITS-Listing

Used to contain a mirror of Wolfgang Helbig's material about v6 unix and pdp-11, but it has been removed.
See also chapter 1.0 of his operating system lecture notes at:
http://doc.cat-v.org/unix/v6/operating-systems-lecture-notes/script/
among others, it explains the assembler language, together with the description of the instruction set
http://doc.cat-v.org/unix/v6/operating-systems-lecture-notes/pdp11/doc/cpu
and finally the Unix Assembler Reference Manual(1) at
http://doc.cat-v.org/unix/v6/operating-systems-lecture-notes/v6/doc/index.html

Other parts of the site deal with Plan 9, fonts and more.

Blog about retrocomputing, including the PiDP-8, running VMS on a raspberry π, 6502-based machines.

V7/x86 is a port of the Seventh Edition of the UNIX operating system to the x86 (IA-32) based PC. UNIX V7 was the last general distribution (around 1979) to come from the Research group at Bell Labs, the original home of UNIX. The port was done mostly around 1999 when "Ancient UNIX" source code licenses first became available, and was revised for release, with some enhancements, during 2006-7.
The distribution includes the full UNIX Version 7 operating system, with source code, pre-built binaries, man pages, and original Version 7 documentation. Also included are a custom UNIX-style x86 assembler, an ACK-based C compiler, and several key early UCB software components such as the C shell, the editors ex and vi, and the pager more.
V7/x86 currently supports ATA (IDE) hard drives, ATAPI CDROM drives, a 1.44M floppy drive, and standard serial ports, in addition to the usual PC screen and keyboard. For easier installation and setup, supplied utilities allow access to CD (ISO 9660) and FAT (MS-DOS) filesystems. Source code is available under a Berkeley-style license.

This is the Computer History Wiki, a knowledge base about historic computers which anyone can edit. Currently, we've got 713 articles!

What follows is my vast, unpublished 1979 "Mother of All Multics Emacs papers" from which all of my lesser and greater Emacs papers, published, internal, and unpublished, were ultimately excerpted, including Prose and CONS: A Commercial Text-Processing System in Lisp in the 1980 Lisp Conference proceedings and the 1980 Honeywell conference paper. It's about time to expose it, and the WWW/HTML is now the ideal vehicle.

Written by one of the foremost experts in high-performance computing and the inventor of Gustafson's Law, The End of Error: Unum Computing explains a new approach to computer arithmetic: the universal number (unum). The unum encompasses all IEEE floating-point formats as well as fixed-point and exact integer arithmetic. This new number type obtains more accurate answers than floating-point arithmetic yet uses fewer bits in many cases, saving memory, bandwidth, energy, and power.