Thank you for the background Ken! I did see in the '77 tape correspondence with Ken
Knowlton regarding Explor and a few other informational files sprinkled in. Glad this tape
is backed up in a few places.
- Matt G.
------- Original Message -------
On Monday, May 22nd, 2023 at 5:07 PM, Ken Thompson <kenbob(a)gmail.com> wrote:
explor is (was) a graphical language by ken knowlton.
it ran offline on the mainframe and produced a mag tape
to be run on a machine called tapex. the tapex machine
exposed micro-film that had to be developed and printed.
not the quickest turnaround.
anyway, i wrote a unix version of explor that printed directly
on a tek display terminal. it was never really used for
anything. somewhere, i have polaroids of pictures of
explor output on the tek.
On Mon, May 22, 2023 at 5:00 PM segaloco via TUHS <tuhs(a)tuhs.org> wrote:
> Good day, something I've come across in my documentation study that I finally
got around to researching a bit is a reference to the language Explor in the V2 ld(I)
page:
>
> 'There are libraries for Fortran (x="f"), C (x="c"), Explor
(x="e") and B (x="b").'
>
> The manual has no corresponding mention of any Explor environment, not even a section
VI page. The only other UNIX Explor reference I can easily find is on the mailing list
here indicating that there is a version of Explor for UNIX on a 1977 tape here (in the
1/explor+dl directory):
https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Applications/Usenix_77/ug091377.tar.gz
>
> Does anyone know if there is continuity here or if the V2 reference and the code on
the tape are only related in that they're both for Explor?
>
> - Matt G.