[its-hackers] Macsyma on ITS lives again

Macsyma is now included in builds of emulated ITS (https://github.com/PDP-10/its. Virtually all sources have been recovered and are included in the build (there are a small number of sources missing, but the FASL files for these are included). The build creates: SYS3; TS MACSYM (Macsyma itself) MAXTUL; TS MAXTUL (Macyma tools – used in maintaining Macsyma) MAXTUL; TS MCL (Macsyma compilation tool) Out-of-core Macsyma FASL files (these are autoloaded by SYS3; TS MACSYM as needed) Very limited testing has been done so far and I invite/urge any interested parties to give it a try. I haven’t upgraded the SYS3; TS MACSYM on ES-ITS to match the latest version included in the DB-ITS build (from above repo). If there are those who want to play with it and who are not up for building the emulators and ITS from source, let me know. I can update the Macsyma on ES-ITS to match and give you an account on that internet-hosted ITS machine. Note: This is ITS Macsyma for MacLisp. Some development continued on ITS Macsyma after 1982, when a copy was released to DOE. Therefore, it may well be that the ITS Macyma that is included in our builds has some limited newer features than other flavors of Macsyma and derived products. And, of course, it is also true that ITS Macsyma lags behind some of the derivative works and contined development on non-ITS platforms. While it isn’t clear that ITS Macsyma is currently valuable for actual productive use, it may provide historical and sentimental value to some of us who worked on it at MIT-LCS. Thanks much to Brad Parker, Kent Pitman, George Carrette, Rich Zippel, Richard Fateman, Bill Dubuque, and Stavros Macrakis for their help and insight into trying to reverse-engineer much-needed knowledge and files to get ITS Macsyma resurrected. If you do play with it and find issues, please enter tickets here: https://github.com/PDP-10/its/issues. I will endeavor to fix issues arising from building, dumping, missing files, etc. I may be able to fix some other kinds of issues as well. Eric (EJS at MIT-MC, when I worked on Macsyma) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://its.victor.se/pipermail/its-hackers_its.victor.se/attachments/20180314/5a969bde/attachment.html>