Pascal Bourguignon recreates machine-readable source for LISP 1.5

Pascal Bourguignon encountered this item on my History of LISP web site:

  • LISP system assembly listing. “FIELD TEST ASSEMBLY OF LISP 1.5 SEPTEMBER 1961”, labeled “Bonnie’s Birthday Assembly”. M.I.T. Museum, donated by Timothy P. Hart and scanned by Jack Harper. PDF (16MB)

and promptly began reconstructing machine-readable source. This morning he announced on comp.lang.lisp his progress (he’s typed in the source, patched it and Dave Pitts’ assembler to nearly recreate the listing, and is close to running it on the emulator). As he says in a README file of his distribution:

This card deck can be assembled with asm7090-2.1.4 applying the small patch ‘asm7090.patch’ to get a listing as identical as possible. asm7090 prints ‘0’ in the generated words for symbols under different headers, so we cannot make a complete word-for-word comparison of the generated code from the listing, until we modify asm7090 in this respect.

The objective is to recover a perforation for performation image of the Source. The same columns, the same typoes should be reproduced.

If you’d like to help Pascal find the remaining errors, or have the LISP 1.5 compiler sources or LISP 1.5 application sources, you can contact Pascal at the email address in the above-mentioned README file. Please also send me email or post a comment to this entry!

[Edited 10 May 2014: community.computerhistory.org/scc => www.softwarepreservation.org, etc.; 2 Jan 2016: http://groups-beta.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/browse_frm/thread/67b1cabdf271870c => https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/comp.lang.lisp/Z7HKvfJxhww]