[SPG_Active_Members] Fw: Here it is! - APL for the Burroughs B5500

[John R. Mashey]

This is great (and about time!).

I offer some related UNIX history:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Lions John got a copy of UNIX V6, which was thoroughly obsolete by the (much more portable and
general) V7,
and wrote the Lions book:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lions%27_Commentary_on_UNIX_6th_Edition,_with_Source_Code:
'Lions' Commentary on UNIX 6th Edition, with Source Code by John Lions (1976) contains the complete source code of the 6th Edition
Unix kernel plus a commentary. It is commonly referred to as the Lions book. Despite its age, it is still considered an excellent
commentary on simple but high quality code.

For many years, the Lions Book was the only Unix kernel documentation available outside Bell Labs. Although the license of 6th
Edition allowed classroom use of the source code, the license of 7th Edition specifically excluded such use, so the book spread
through illegal copy machine reproductions (a kind of samizdat). It was commonly held to be the most copied book in computer
science.'

It was widely used (including inside BTL) although AT&T lawyers hassled John endlessly.  (John had sabbaticals at Bell Labs, and all
this happened with Ken & Dennis' moral support.)

I lost my copies somewhere, but saw John in Sydney about a year before he died (young, ill for a few years), and he kindly replaced
them - I donated them: http://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102707366)

I got my car's UNIX license plate as part of a limited auction in which the money went to USENIX towards an award in his name:
http://web.archive.org/web/20010412130652/http://www.usenix.org/publications/login/1999-4/award.html 

Anyway, it was extraordinarily valuable to have the source code, AND a well-written commentary in a more-or-less timely fashion,
done by somebody who could talk wit hthe people who wrote it.


-----Original Message-----
From: scc_active-bounces at computerhistory.org [mailto:scc_active-bounces at computerhistory.org] On Behalf Of Len Shustek
Sent: Sunday, September 08, 2013 9:49 PM
To: Nigel Williams
Cc: scc_active at computerhistory.org; Paul Kimpel; Stan Sieler; John C. Hollar
Subject: Re: [SPG_Active_Members] Fw: Here it is! - APL for the Burroughs B5500

We are starting to establish a good working relationship with Microsoft for the preservation and release of their historic software.
As the process develops I will keep those on the shortlist to ask for. I don't mean to be a tease, but I've got another one in the
pipeline at the moment that I shouldn't identify but will probably be of interest.
-- Len


At 07:49 PM 9/8/2013, Nigel Williams wrote:
>On Mon, Sep 9, 2013 at 11:04 AM, Len Shustek <len at shustek.com> wrote:
> > By the way, in May we received permission from Apple to release the 
> > source code of Apple II DOS from 1978. And last Friday I signed an 
> > agreement with Microsoft for the release of the source code of 
> > Microsoft Word
> version 1.1A.
> > Stay tuned for both of those.
>
>They will certainly be interesting to browse.
>
>Two items of Microsoft technology from the early days I would be 
>interested to see are:
>
>1. The PCODE based applications developed for the Apple Macintosh. I 
>understand Microsoft Word, Chart, and Multiplan were PCODE based, that 
>is a small interpreter for pseudo-code to allow the applications to 
>squeeze into the early 128KB and 512KB compact Macintosh.
>
>2. Microsoft Access version 1..0 or version 1.1. My recollection is 
>that it was mostly implemented in 8086 assembly code.

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