12 Jun
2024
12 Jun
'24
2:26 a.m.
Well, at least one copy of the source code escaped: I compiled and ran
it on a Sun-3 server at UCSB ca. 1980. As I recall it was a formidable
wad of Fortran. Alas, it's long gone: any backups extant would be on
media likely too deteriorated to read, even if we had the hardware to
read it.
Cheers,
/Frew
On 2024-06-11 10:42, Nelson H. F. Beebe wrote:
Doug McIlroy kindly sent me contact information for
John Chambers,
co-author of the cited book about the S system. I have just heard
back from John, who offered a link to his summary paper from the
2020 HOPL conference proceedings
S, R, and data science
https://doi.org/10.1145/3386334
and reported that S was licensed to AT&T Unix customers only in binary
form, and that the original source code may no longer exist.
That is a definitive answer, even if not the one that I was hoping to
find.