11 Jun
2024
11 Jun
'24
7:42 p.m.
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.
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- Nelson H. F. Beebe Tel: +1 801 581 5254 -
- University of Utah -
- Department of Mathematics, 110 LCB Internet e-mail: beebe(a)math.utah.edu -
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- Salt Lake City, UT 84112-0090, USA URL: http://www.math.utah.edu/~beebe/ -
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12 Jun
12 Jun
2:26 a.m.
New subject: [tuhs] Early statistical software in Unix
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.
11:01 a.m.
New subject: [tuhs] Early statistical software in Unix
Hi Nelson,
[John] reported that S was licensed to AT&T Unix
customers only in
binary form, and that the original source code may no longer exist.
Given your point about ‘S’ being an awkward search term, does John
Chambers recall a colloquial longer name, perhaps for when context was
needed? Also, any fragments of filenames he can recall, whether source
or binary distribution.
Given Bell Labs long history of inventions, it presumably had an archive
of material and an archivist or librarian back in the '70s. Back then,
contemporary data on disc and tape was impractical to archive — too much
of it, to expensive to duplicate, and difficult to predict what would be
worth keeping — but paper was their trade. An archival print of source
to match a licensed release would have been possible. Perhaps even
preferred by the lawyers. I'm surprised they weren't considering how to
archive ‘today’.
--
Cheers, Ralph.
145
days inactive
146
days old
2 comments
3 participants
participants (3)
-
James Frew -
Nelson H. F. Beebe -
Ralph Corderoy