Re: Janus Ada 1.5 Ada cp/m manuals

["Randy Brukardt" <randy@rrsoftware.com>]

"Luke A. Guest" <laguest@archeia.com> wrote in message 
news:sffuqj$1br8$1@gioia.aioe.org...
> On 17/08/2021 08:23, Randy Brukardt wrote:
...
>> The only way for them to exist is for someone to scan a printed version.
>>
>> I have a single printed version in our archives (with installation
>> instructions for 8" floppies dated March 5, 1984). Its got someone's
>> hardwritten notes in it (it's not pristine). Anyway, since it is the only
>> known version, I won't let it out of the office, since it is literally
>> irreplaceable.
>>
>> I've offered to others to scan it to PDFs (one per page, that's all I can
>> figure out how to do on our cheap multifunction machine here) if someone
>
> Maybe you should let someone come in with their own laptop and scanner to 
> do it.

That would be an option; I didn't think of it as the last person that wanted 
it was in Scandinavia and visiting Madison WI would be far more expense than 
giving me a few hundred dollars to do it. If there is some US-based person 
that wants to do that, the dynamics are different.

>Having an official public release would be good for historical reasons.

Most likely don't have the capability to make such a release (I do have a 
Z-80 CP/M machine in storage, but it's unlikely to boot - S-100 machines 
stored a year usually needed extensive cleaning of contacts to work, after 
20 years...).

> Having the source would be even better, for curios like me who have been 
> wondering how old 8-bit compilers worked.

So far as I know, that's (partially) lost. I had moved it to dual 5 1/4" 
floppies, and I was asked to throw out all of the redundant stuff to save 
space when we moved to a smaller space. When I was retiring the last working 
machine with 5 1/4", I decided to move it into our version control, but was 
unable to read all of the floppies. So parts are lost. That's OK from an RRS 
perspective, as we wouldn't use an ancient code generator in anything new 
anyway (it would need to hook to the modern optimizer/static analyzer, so it 
would need a full redo anyway). I did manage to get the runtime into our 
version control, something that would be a lot more work to reproduce.

In any case, parts of the source (and more importantly, design) are still in 
use so giving it away isn't really an option.

                                   Randy.