Source Hunters

How many of us have read beautiful or otherwise HistoricSoftware? How many of us would like to have a second look? This page is dedicated to the programs that we have read and know are worth reading. Which ones are they? What's good about them? And are their any leads to finding and preserving them?

Integrated Circuit Drafting Tool

This c program was written by BillCroft in the late '70s. It ran on a pdp-11 and drove a tektronix 4014 storage display terminal. I read the program in one afternoon. I didn't feel any need to run it to understand it. It just said what it did as if c were invented to describe this application. The program included implementation of a randomly accessed spatial database and the shortest and cleanest 4014 driver I've ever seen. -- WardCunningham

Acquisition status: The program probably belongs to Purdue University. I don't know if it was ever distributed. I've written to Bill to see if he has a copy. He says he may, on a 9-track tape out in the garage.

Smalltalk-80 Version 1

This is the implementation described in the BlueBook and provided to only a few companies before Version 2 came out of PARC with PluggableViews?. I am of the opinion that version 1 is a sweet spot in the development of Smalltalk, where a maximum of functionality was delivered with a minimum of mechanism. It could be that earlier versions were even better but I suspect not. AdeleGoldberg and GlenKrasner? had completed a refactoring and house cleaning pass over the image right before version 1 was released. Very early versions of Smalltalk didn't benefit from the absolutist "everything is an object" mentality that makes Smalltalk-80's virtual machine so simple. Later versions of Smalltalk have all been polluted by host system interface logic that says liitle about what it is to be Smalltalk. -- WardCunningham

Acquisition status: Tapes went to Apple, HP, Dec and Tektronix. Someone who was there, or at PARC, would be the most likely lead on machine readable copies. There was an image dump and a bytecode trace that went with the source. These should be kept together.

SPSS -- Statistical Package for the Social Sciences

I maintained an early version of this huge Fortran program in the '70s. Before SPSS, anyone analyzing experimental data had to choose an analysis program, such as BMD5R, and punch their data to meet its input expectations. SPSS collapsed all these programs into a single program consisting of a resident kernel and dynamically loaded overlays. One overlay collected all of the data specification logic. This ran early in any SPSS run so that subsequent overlays would find consistently organized data as the kernel sequenced through desired analysis. -- WardCunningham

Acquisition status: SPSS was created by the statistics department at some midwestern university. Eventually SPSS, Inc. was formed and they took the product to the pc. Even the original was too big to edit except with a batch mode editor. We used Modify. The distributions came out about once a year. Release notes warned against printing a listing as no one then had spooling disks large enough to hold the print.

I remember seeing this - While taking early courses in computer programming and working as a computer operator in the Computing Center in the 70's at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. You could run separate programs from the package from 110 baud teletype terminals and later on from 300 baud video terminals in the Student Computer Center. The host was a CDC computer with 60 bit words. The package could be used for all kinds of data, not just those related to the Social Sciences. I also remember KRONOS and NOS which were used on the Cdc Host. One of the professors teaching Fortran left at the end of a semester to become involved in a developing technology which he called Microcomputers. The SPSS package is still around and some have made it available for PCs. Found one site: http://www.statsol.ie/bmdp/bmdp.htm Version 6.1 of SPSS was still in use at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln in 1999: http://www.unl.edu/migrate/overview.htm (from that page it appears the BMDP was bought by SPSS Inc) When checking out SPSS on Google, a surprising number of sites outside the US pop up. The package has made it around the world! It seems is is available even today -- One possible source: http://www.ccs.ryerson.ca/fac_staff/index.cfm?cblockID=39 Also at: http://www.spss.com/ -- AnonymousOnPurpose

CDC's Mace Operating System

This is an exceptional operating system written for an exceptional machine, the CDC6000. It is a rewrite of Scope, CDC's then shipping system, by a single, highly productive, and well organized individual: GregMansfield.

Acquisition status: Purdue University forked a version of Mace in the middle '60s while Greg was still working. Something in that timeframe would be the one to find.