Help Wanted

As time passes, it becomes apparent that products, documentation, Websites, and organisations sink without a trace, and entire swathes of computing, and technology history, and culture becomes lost. With that in mind, this page exists, to raise awareness of "endangered" (i.e. things are known, but slowly becoming forgotten/lost), or sparsely-documented aspects of historical interest.

Banyan VINES

We're always on the lookout, for more versions of VINES, and associated software, and hardware, as well as documentation. The #banyan-resurrection channel, on Discord always welcomes new faces!

Computing, in South Korea

Whilst looking for information on WebKit, and stumbling across a copy of Samsung's Dolfin browser source code, for their proprietary Samsung Handset Platform (SHP), and Bada layer, it occurred to us, that we have very little information, in English, let alone Korean, about the development of the computing culture, and industry, in South Korea, despite prominent companies, like LG, and Samsung being present, in the global conscious.

Samsung Bada

Bada was a rare attempt at launching a new smartphone OS, written in C++, based on extending a proprietary, internally-developed feature platform (MOCHA/SHP), with a public SDK. (It was conceptually similar, in terms of positioning, to Qualcomm BREW). Most handsets used the Mentor Graphics Nucleus kernel, and the SDK, and documentation was available, for a short time, but copies of it are now difficult to come by - so, we should probably make some kind of effort, to change this.

UNIX Machines

ETRI's 45th Anniversary page mentions HAN-8, SSM-16 (a Motorola 68K, UNIX V.7 system), and STM-32, as well as the MAHA distributed file system, and computing architecture. A PDF, in Korean, from KoreaScience elaborates on some of the implementation, of the SSM-16.

Sadly, there's very little information, on these early systems, or their development. Maybe someone, either involved in their development, or usage, or with access to documentation/hardware/software, inside South Korea would be able to shine a light on these?

IBM AIX/ESA

It appears that very scant documentation exists, on IBM's OSF/1-based AIX/ESA operating system, beyond pricing, and press releases, and so far, no copies of the software has been discovered. It would be interesting, to examine this product, in the context of IBM's microkernel-based OS initiatives, such as WorkPlace OS.

Stratus (Open)VOS

To date, no copies of OpenVOS, or VOS have been found, and although Stratus Technologies maintain some public documentation, on their Website, their public FTP server was quietly closed down, a while ago, and the archives of it, that exist, are likely to be incomplete. It would also be interesting, to examine any SDKs, and place VOS in the context of MULTICS, and its descendants.

Taligent

We're looking for documentation, as well as software released by Taligent, or as part of the Pink project, at Apple - especially related to CommonPoint, or TalOS.