4 ms·

It did! I actually got a nice reply from Whitfield Diffie, basically saying "Haha, no." They have what amounts to a never-declassify-anything-digital policy. I

It did! I actually got a nice reply from Whitfield Diffie, basically saying "Haha, no." They have what amounts to a never-declassify-anything-digital policy. I got a similar letter from the NNSA. Through a friend-of-a-friend, I did actually manage to get a copy of the source code to CTSS, the cray time sharing system, on microfiche from Lawrence Livermore National Lab, and I even had it digitized (but not OCR'd), but it's written in a language called COMPASS i've never found a compiler for.

greenyoda 7y ago
COMPASS was the name of the assembler language for the earlier supercomputers that Seymour Cray designed while he was still working at CDC, such as the CDC 6000-series: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COMPASS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COMPASS
- fentonc 7y ago
  I misremembered, I think the CTSS source was actually written in a language called LRLTRAN. I just remembered it was something obscure.
  - tjalfi 7y ago
    LLNL used to have LRLTRAN manuals online. It's an extended Fortran-66 for Systems Programming.
skissane 7y ago
> They have what amounts to a never-declassify-anything-digital policy From what I've heard, part of it relates to volume. If someone asks to declassify a single page document, it is pretty easy to evaluate it and decide whether it can be released or not. Presented with thousands of pages of old source code, it is an immense undertaking. Added to that, people don't understand the old source code any more, and worry that there might be something lurking hidden in there that should not be released, but they might not notice it due to not understanding it. I hope at least they never destroy any of this old stuff, and maybe one day (even if only decades or centuries from now) the US government will decide that enough time has gone past that it no longer could pose any risk.

4 ms·

It did! I actually got a nice reply from Whitfield Diffie, basically saying "Haha, no." They have what amounts to a never-declassify-anything-digital policy. I

by fentonc 7y ago

greenyoda 7y ago
COMPASS was the name of the assembler language for the earlier supercomputers that Seymour Cray designed while he was still working at CDC, such as the CDC 6000-series: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COMPASS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COMPASS
- fentonc 7y ago
  I misremembered, I think the CTSS source was actually written in a language called LRLTRAN. I just remembered it was something obscure.
  - tjalfi 7y ago
    LLNL used to have LRLTRAN manuals online. It's an extended Fortran-66 for Systems Programming.
skissane 7y ago
> They have what amounts to a never-declassify-anything-digital policy From what I've heard, part of it relates to volume. If someone asks to declassify a single page document, it is pretty easy to evaluate it and decide whether it can be released or not. Presented with thousands of pages of old source code, it is an immense undertaking. Added to that, people don't understand the old source code any more, and worry that there might be something lurking hidden in there that should not be released, but they might not notice it due to not understanding it. I hope at least they never destroy any of this old stuff, and maybe one day (even if only decades or centuries from now) the US government will decide that enough time has gone past that it no longer could pose any risk.