[LispM-Hackers] Backup tape for review

[ford@objs.com]

"James A. Crippen" wrote:

> Al Kossow graciously sent me the contents of an Exploder backup tape
> that he came upon.  It appears to have come from the TI CS Lab, or
> that's what some of the files seem to say.  In any case it's a
> bzipped tarball on kappa at /home/lispm/cerebus_bkup_burst.tar.bz2
>
> The tarball unpacks into the current directory.  It's a *lot* of
> files.  The files seem to be in an Exploder-specific backup format
> (not having experience with Exploder backups I'm not certain).  The
> files are human readable, but they're not easily readable since
> they've had their CRLFs stripped, presumably by the backup program.
> If anyone who doesn't have an account on kappa wants to dump the
> backup on their Exploder and perhaps create a more humanly useful
> tarball of the tape let me know and I'll make the tarball available
> (or give you an account, whichever's easier).  (If you don't have an
> Exploder you could presumably reverse engineer the format or port the
> Exploder backup code to another Lisp.)
>
> The contents seem to be tangential to our efforts, but nonetheless
> interesting both technically and historically.  Needless to say I
> didn't read all 1180 files, so there may be secrets still hidden
> within.

It was a trip back in time for me, but I don't see anything relevant to the
current effort. Its mid-80's stuff from one of the AI branches (Bruce Flinchbaugh,
Nichael Cramer, Dan Nichols, LaMott Oren, Raj Wall, Dan Donahue, Dave Davis,
Garr Lystad).  Curious that a tape like this is still floating around.  It gives hope
that the mcr src and dev tools might still be out there somewhere, too.

Steve