The original FORTH for the IBM 1130 has been found and is being restored to run in emulation!
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HI THERE
That's what the original printed when it had initialized :)
Read all about it here: https://rescue1130.blogspot.com.au/2018/03/historical-recreationrestoration-of.html
There are further restoration-related tidbits in these posts:
- https://rescue1130.blogspot.com.au/2018/03/various-items-disk-drives-ethernet.html
- https://rescue1130.blogspot.com.au/2018/03/restoring-original-source-code-for.html
- https://rescue1130.blogspot.com.au/2018/02/built-battery-for-roomba-discovered.html
As of writing this post, the current caveat emptor is that the code has not yet been released.
From link #3 above,
It looked like no copy existed until I discovered an obscure reference from 2011 on the 1130 google group which suggested that Chuck did send some code to a friend of mine.
The post wasn't linked, but the group is low-traffic enough that Google Groups' rather primitive search capabilities was able to find it: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/ibm1130/KpvBOrgT3Pw/WCj5Z-OmG4YJ
Continuing from link #3,
I contacted Bob Flanders, who dug through his old email and discovered a previously unnoticed attachment which contained sixteen scanned images. These were twelve pages of an IBM 1130 assembler run and four pages of cryptic FORTH-like code.
I typed in the sixteen pages to make them machine readable, then Bob and I began to attempt a resurrection.
This is apparently going well (based on the positive noises in the first link).
I'm very interested to see this released (in any form), and have commented on the first post (the one linked in bold) saying as much.
NB. Please feel free (don't wait for me) to post updates as this develops.
I completely forgot to add the source link! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16611505
I closed the tab just before I vacuumed up the links into the previous comment, so forgot to add it. I knew there was something I was missing, and just remembered.
I'm interested in old software. Please post updates here!
Thanks Ken!