Subject: Re: s1 DECtape fragments

From: [email-masked]
Date: Thu, 7 Jun 2001 02:21:08 -0400

Turns out I have the required  uid and passwd already saved up,
but I looked again at your decoded treasures.   Probably only
some bits of the s1 tape are actually interesting, but there are
some stories.

E.g. the init.s in s1/frag2 has reference to "melda" and other
strings with "mel" -- this is Michael E. Lesk, and "da" is
directory assistance.  He wrote an early program to do name
lookup from a touch-tone phone.   It used a mechanical-optical
voice generator to read back the number (much like traditional
film sound techniques).  Later, in the lab, we got a real AT&T
Picturephone (very low-res TV phone) which actually could
connect over the building phone network to (and between)
executives.   There was a large box of hardware that could render
text (expensive CGA -> Picturephone video), so from
our Picturephone we could call the local number, key in a name,
and see the names and numbers on the screen.

There was also a Picturephone link to the Holmdel site of
the Labs, about an hour south, which had a TV camera in
a videoconf-demo room.  It could be pointed and zoomed by
Touchtone keying.  We sometimes watched the Watergate
senate hearings by pointing the camera at a regular TV screen
left on in the Holmdel room.

But in some ways, the interesting part of this particular fragment
is that /usr/mel/da was hard-coded in init.s.  Live and learn.

And also, your note reminded me to repatriate the 3rd and 4th manuals for
storage here as well.  Even though I seem to have helped
supply them, local digital versions aren't conveniently at hand.
Redundancy is good.

	Regards,
	Dennis

Subject: s1 DECtape fragments
From: Warren Toomey <[email-masked]>
To: Dennis Ritchie <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 7 Jun 2001 14:36:32 +1000 (EST)

Dennis,
	Those fragments of files that I was able to extract from the
s1 DECtape you have. I've modified my source code comparator at
http://minnie.tuhs.org/UnixTree
so that you can now compare the actual differences between files.

So for example, by clicking on the Search button on
http://minnie.tuhs.org/UnixTree/1972_stuff/s1/frag0.html

I can see that this fragment was a part of ed3.s, and I can compare
the fragment to the 5th Edition version of ed3.s

The web server isn't intelligent to know that you wrote all this source,
so you can use au2000 and rmq7hle for authentication.

Cheers,
	Warren