Dusty Decks: Preserving historic software
by Paul McJones
Peter Z. Ingerman comments:
‘… if any readers of this comment would care to chat about UNIVAC, I’d be delighted to hear from you. In particular, I’m looking for documentation on something called “Overdrive”, that modified a UNIVAC I to allow (under some circumstances) to have three instructions per word, rather than two. I can be reached at pzi@ingerman.org.’
My name is Paul McJones. I am using this weblog to discuss historic computer software and hardware among other topics. For several months I’ve been studying the early history of Fortran, and trying to track down the source code for the original Fortran compiler. Although I just set up this weblog recently (June-July 2004), I’ve created back-dated entries to document my quest in chronological order, starting here.
I welcome suggestions for additional topics, and also would like to invite others to contribute articles on the history of early programming languages, operating systems, database management systems, and applications.
If you like this web log, you might be interested in the System R website documenting the history of the System R relational database research project, which gave birth to the SQL query language.
