4 ms·
Much of IBM’s internal informal history was lost in the transition from the RSCS based TOOLSRUN forums to a mix of Lotus Notes/Domino/web forums around 1999–200
by epc 4y ago
Much of IBM’s internal informal history was lost in the transition from the RSCS based TOOLSRUN forums to a mix of Lotus Notes/Domino/web forums around 1999–2000 (note that this was a business choice, all internal fora were already available via nntp). IBM Research might have additional documentation on the 801 and related products but it looks like you’d have to contact their research library directly, nothing on line.
- sennight 4y agoI wouldn't even dare to dream for version controlled source... I was over the moon when roughly dated personal backups of research edition Unix started popping up. From what I've seen in IBM documentation and a small number of code leaks - it would actually be very difficult to faithfully present their historical code simply due to the Rube Goldberg SCM they've employed. It was so wild that it permeated into their xcoff executable format.
- epc 4y agoDepends on the product lab. The o/s I worked on had some form of SCM dating to the 1970s (CLEAR). The thing is most of the source code from the 1960s and even 1970s would have been punch cards, shifting to tape in the 70s. There's probably landfills near Austin, Rochester, and Westchester county that have punch cards and tape libraries since I doubt IBM held onto them. At some point IBM shifted from the belief that maintaining history was important to the business to believing anything older than 90 days was too dangerous (from a litigation perspective) to hold onto.