{"id":1214,"date":"2023-05-10T19:01:09","date_gmt":"2023-05-11T02:01:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mcjones.org\/dustydecks\/?p=1214"},"modified":"2023-05-10T19:01:09","modified_gmt":"2023-05-11T02:01:09","slug":"xerox-parc-ifs-archive","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mcjones.org\/dustydecks\/archives\/2023\/05\/10\/1214\/","title":{"rendered":"Xerox PARC IFS archive"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>In 2014, the Computer History Museum released the Xerox Alto file server archive, constituting about 15,000 files from the Xerox Alto personal computer including the Alto operating system; BCPL, Mesa, and (portions of the) Smalltalk programming environments; applications such as Bravo, Draw, and the Laurel email client; fonts and printing software (PARC had the first laser printers); and server software (including the IFS file server and the Grapevine distributed mail and name server). I told the story behind that archive <a href=\"https:\/\/mcjones.org\/dustydecks\/archives\/2014\/10\/24\/784\/\">here<\/a>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Today CHM released the Xerox PARC Interim File System (IFS) archive:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\">\n<p>The archive contains nearly 150,000 unique files\u2014around four gigabytes of information\u2014and covers an astonishing landscape: programming languages; graphics; printing and typography; mathematics; networking; databases; file systems; electronic mail; servers; voice; artificial intelligence; hardware design; integrated circuit design tools and simulators; and additions to the Alto archive.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<p>A <a href=\"https:\/\/computerhistory.org\/blog\/a-backup-of-historical-proportions\/?utm_campaign=PARC%20Archive%20Release&amp;utm_medium=email&amp;_hsmi=257598549&amp;_hsenc=p2ANqtz-984tj9L_YJmjgtXuRxS2-JNUhEuC9LGEPSY9yAx3Yzn2_Oc1_lkWPSPt2KNweqyoN9HWgSbrNHomTsW470yD0UObcQhqfPy3pRBXF75Dh4ZDnuxYg&amp;utm_content=257598549\">blog post<\/a> by David Brock introduces the archive. Access to the archive itself is available <a href=\"https:\/\/info.computerhistory.org\/xerox-parc-archive\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I began working on this project in 2018 under an NDA with PARC: reading the old media prepared years earlier by Al Kossow, updating the conversion software I&#8217;d written for the earlier Alto project, and winnowing down a list of 300,000 files to the 150,000 files that I submitted to PARC management for approval. David Brock&#8217;s post ends with an Acknowledgments section noting all the people at CHM and PARC who contributed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In 2014, the Computer History Museum released the Xerox Alto file server archive, constituting about 15,000 files from the Xerox Alto personal computer including the Alto operating system; BCPL, Mesa, and (portions of the) Smalltalk programming environments; applications such as Bravo, Draw, and the Laurel email client; fonts and printing software (PARC had the first &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/mcjones.org\/dustydecks\/archives\/2023\/05\/10\/1214\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Xerox PARC IFS archive&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,9,2],"tags":[29,30],"class_list":["post-1214","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","category-repositories","category-software-history","tag-alto","tag-ifs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mcjones.org\/dustydecks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1214","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mcjones.org\/dustydecks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mcjones.org\/dustydecks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mcjones.org\/dustydecks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mcjones.org\/dustydecks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1214"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mcjones.org\/dustydecks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1214\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1216,"href":"https:\/\/mcjones.org\/dustydecks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1214\/revisions\/1216"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mcjones.org\/dustydecks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1214"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mcjones.org\/dustydecks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1214"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mcjones.org\/dustydecks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1214"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}