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@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@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.