[SCC_Active_Members] FW: Doug Ross - Obit; CNC history sources

[Paul McJones]

Lee,

I am very much in agreement about the importance of proactive collection 
of professional papers (I happen to be working on such an effort as we 
speak).

It would also be great if documents like your attached "Material on CP-6 
for the Computer History Museum.pdf" were available on the Museum's web 
site, so they would be indexed by the internal search appliance and by 
the public web search engines. I was interested to see that in addition 
to the CP-V work, Ed also donated materials on JOSS, SHARE OS, etc. (in 
Lot 2). I put together a similar informal "finding aid" for the donation 
of Mark Halpern (see http://www.mcjones.org/halpern/catalog.html), but 
it's not clear to me if it will ever be put online at the Museum.


Paul

Courtney, Lee wrote:
> Personal papers by a significant practitioner *OR* that offer a
> historically significant view into computing history should always be
> accepted. I think we should be more proactive in that area. A great
> example are Ed Bryan's personal papers that the Museum accepted a couple
> years ago (see attached). Ed was an early employee of SDS, and managed
> system software development at SDS, thru the Xerox acquisition, and up
> thru the Honeywell era. While Ed was a competent manager and made
> significant technical contributions to mainframe operating system
> technology, I doubt if anyone else here has heard of him. Yet he
> designed a significant mainframe operating system (CP-V) and his
> personal papers offer a unique and extremely valuable chronology of
> mainframe OS development from the mid-1960s up thru the later 1980s.
> Some very interesting items about the corporate dynamics between CP-V,
> Multics, and GCOS within Honeywell.
>
> So personal papers are a treasure trove of information tying together a
> multitude of currents within our industry, and I'd assert the best
> source of the little eddies that often offer huge insight into decisions
> and outcomes which may otherwise may remain a mystery.
>
> Bottom line - we should be getting more personal papers in addition to
> manuals, brochures, reports, etc...
>