The information age

[dwight]

I have particular interest in early 4004 code. Intel is an empty box. It was just by luck that someone saved many of the original films of the 4004 chips. As for code, I've got a few bits and piece but little original source. I did find some stuff searching the Naval Post Graduate schools library. It is a good thing the government services hang on to things long after they have no value to them ( like 8 inch disk, haa ). Still, only 2 original sources, poorly pdf'ed. This was all work done by students of Gary Kildall ( you remember him, don't you ).
Most know Tom Pittman from his Tiny Basic on the 6502/6800. He also wrote the assembler that ran on a 4004 for the 4004. It was likely the first assembler written to run on same microprocessor. Intel supplied it on EPROMs but the only information I have so far is three of the four EPROMs with good data ( mostly good anyway ) and one almost empty EPROM.
I've contacted Tom about it but after moving from California, he said it is unlikely any of it remains. I keep meaning to make an adjustable threshold 1702 reader but have to many other projects on the fire.
What I did recover was almost lost, I got the ones I'd been looking for from a friend in Norway. He knew I was looking for the set. When he saw them in a pile of 1702s that were being sold, he saved them from being erased because he recognize the Intel EPROM number on the paper tags.
While off little practical use, these are important parts of the thread that brings us to the processors we have today. The loss would have been gone forever had some sharp eyes not noticed them.
Should anyone come across 1702s with A0740,A741,A0742 and especially A0743 tags on them, please don't erase them.
Dwight


________________________________
From: cctalk <cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org> on behalf of Alan Perry via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org>
Sent: Tuesday, November 26, 2019 12:00 PM
To: cctalk at classiccmp.org <cctalk at classiccmp.org>
Subject: Re: The information age



On 11/26/19 11:40 AM, Fred Cisin via cctalk wrote:
> On Tue, 26 Nov 2019, dwight via cctalk wrote:
>> It is such a shame that in the "information age", we have lost so much
>> of the information. It doesn't help when we have people like Jobs that
>> like to write their own version.
>
> As I understand it, he has personally stopped doing that.

The thing is that all histories are the writer's own version, even ones
that try to record what "really" happened.

>> It is even worse when companies think it is a law suit risk to keep
>> information more than a year. It is all lost.

Having been involved in intellectual property legal discovery, I will
confirm that it can be a risk.

>
> Not only the liability, but the assumption that it is being stored
> somewhere else, and therefore the physical forms are no more than an
> inconvenient waste of space.
> (cf. 1970s purge of episodes of Doctor Who, and 2019 destruction of all
> YahooGroups files)


I have been involved with making sure that the content of a number of
YahooGroups related to Lotus Cars is not lost. My computer spent 40
hours backing up the 174000 messages posted to the Turbo Esprit group.

But, even if Yahoo hadn't shut it down, most of the info there was not
really usable because there was no good way to search it. At least, now
that we have been chased from Yahoo, the backups that I and others have
made have been copied and spread all over, so it is better preserved,
though not any more accessible.

alan

>
>
>> "The information lost age"
> It is written in sand.
>