Observant audience members at Bjarne Stroustrup’s HOPL-III C++ talk this past weekend may have noticed on the last slide a mention of the C++ Historical Sources Archive at the Computer History Museum. This is a project Bjarne and I have been working on in the background for a year or two. Bjarne convinced the appropriate authorities at AT&T to approve releasing the Cfront source code, and then dug up listings, documentation, and/or machine-readable source for Cfront releases E, 2.0, and 3.0. Willem Wakker kindly supplied a copy of release 1.0. We have also tracked down some early libraries including libg++, COOL, LEDA, Array_Alg, STL, InterViews, ET++, and more. We would be very interested also in early applications written in C++ (especially pre-1990).
By the way, what was previously called the Software Collection Committee at the Computer History Museum has a new name (the Software Preservation Group), a new domain name (www.softwarepreservation.org) and a new chairman (Al Kossow, the Museum’s Software Curator and the creator of www.bitsavers.org).
Update 2024/05/08: Updated URLs for HOPL III and Bjarne’s talk.
Is there a tar ball for Cfront-3.03 for easy download? Thanks a lot!
Good suggestion! Try http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/c_plus_plus/cfront/release_3.0.3/source/cfront_3_0_3.tgz
(note among other things I renamed release_3.03 to release_3.0.3, to match the actual distribution directory).