Recently all sorts of wonderful and important bits of history have been saved and made available, often with permissive licenses and source code, and too often right on the verge of extinction.

Honeywell Multics, the earliest builds of Unix “v0” (and later Research UNIX releases, too), DEC XVM/DOS and XVM/RSX, DEMOS, MTS (Michigan Terminal System), 86-DOS, Coherent, PRIMOS (via prirun), 8-not GEOS 2.0, the Commodore CBM operating systems, Microsoft 6502 BASIC (their first product), PERQ’s software, UniFLEX/FLEX, Kronos, and even stuff like NitrOS-9, FUZIX, ZCPR, etc.

I know the “digital dark age” lament is a post and discussion in and of itself, but I am shocked how much of our history almost disappeared forever - and how much already has.

Guys like Al Kossow and Bob Supnik and Warren Toomey and Jason Scott the rest of them don’t get near the credit they deserve. The Living Computer Museum, Computer History Museum, UK’s National Museum of Computing, along with efforts such as PUPS, TUHS, the SIMH team, MAME/MESS, Archive.org, Textfiles and BBS Archive, and gatherings like the VCF shows and CoCoFest all deserve so much more exposure to the new generation of programmers. (Edit: Non-exhaustive list with no offense to the others left out, only listed the first to come to mind.)

These aren’t just dead systems and ancient and obsolete technology. So often these are true works of art and miracles of efficiency and compact coding. (Story of Mel!)

We could all benefit from learning to do more with less in an era where, as angersock posted recently, we have 24 CPU’s and can’t even move the mouse.