Post by @thalia@discuss.systems

2026-10-16 04:38 UTC

Whew! I just finished porting 2,852 lines of PDP-11 assembly to C by hand over the past week! This is for form/fed, a form letter editor and generator with template substitutions, introduced in 1971. It's the largest UNIX utility that was never ported to C, and has since been forgotten. 1/6 #unix #retrocomputing #vintagecomputing #reverseengineering

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@thalia@discuss.systems 2026-10-16 04:38

Most notably, the oldest list of UNIX licensees was produced from a form letter database. Ken Thompson used form/fed to simplify mailing to early users: rather than hand- or typewriting messages, this fancy tool would substitute each recipient and the date. In 1975, when UNIX News was starting up, he used this form letter database to dump the list of contacts that served as the initial subscriber list. The circumstances of the UNIX V4 tape found at the University of Utah are still somewhat unclear, as it was apparently not used for research and only sparse traces of its acquisition survived. But some letters to Martin Newell are in that form letter database and I hope to recover more information through forensic analysis. 2/6 #unix #retrocomputing #vintagecomputing

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