Article on first edition UNIX in IEEE Annals of the History of Computing

For those that have access to IEEE Xplore (or a decently stocked library), the latest issue of the IEEE Annals of the History of Computing has an interesting article on restoring the first edition of UNIX (from paper copies, Al Kossow is mentioned) by Warren Toomey. The abstract: "Until recently, the earliest versions of the Unix operating system were believed to have been lost completely. In 2008, however, a restoration team from the Unix Heritage Society completed an effort to resurrect and restore the first edition Unix to a running and usable state from a newly discovered listing of the system?s assembly source code." Interesting read! Fun statement I noticed, with respect to the "factory faults" thread that is ongoing: "Should bugs or faults found in the leg- acy software be fixed, or should the envi- ronment be modified to work around the problem?" (p. 78) Joe. -- Joachim Thiemann :: http://www.tsp.ece.mcgill.ca/~jthiem