[SCC_Active_Members] FW: SDS software status

[Al Kossow]

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From: Al Kossow <aek at bitsavers.org>
Date: Wed, 27 Sep 2006 17:16:13 -0700
To: <simh-developer at simh.trailing-edge.com>
Conversation: SDS software status
Subject: FW: SDS software status



------ Forwarded Message
From: Al Kossow <aek at bitsavers.org>
Date: Wed, 27 Sep 2006 17:14:57 -0700
To: <simh-developer at trailing-edge.com>, <scc-active at computerhistory.org>
Conversation: SDS software status
Subject: SDS software status


In the spring of this year, the Computer History Museum was contacted by
someone who had several SDS 900 series machines, and told us that he had the
entire SDS software library from Honeywell in the early 80's.

The donation arrived at CHM on Friday, and I've spent the past few days
going through it. It does, in fact contain ALMOST the entire collection as
it existed at Honeywell in March, 1982. Unfortunately, the 940 timesharing
system software was already gone from the library by 1982, and the off-line
diagnostic tape for the 940 which appeared in a library inventory is
missing.

There is, a very large collection of user's manuals, program writeups, paper
and magnetic tape. This is the largest software collection that has survived
largely in on piece from a 60's computer manufacturer that I've ever seen.

Scans of most of the program library listings are on line now at bitsavers
under pdf/sds/9xx/programLibrary. I'm in the process of post-processing
several dozen programming and other user's manuals.

There are about 100 7-track tapes which will have to wait until I have a
reliable way to read them. The smaller program library programs were written
to 9-track tape in 1982, and those have been successfully read and a
machine-readable index of their contents have been started.

This discovery has reinforced my opinion that there may still be large
archives of 60's and 70's software in the hands of individuals, and that the
most important thing to do is to get the word out that CHM is committed to
the preservation of these archives, and has the facilities to recover these
latent archives and keep them for posterity.


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