Photo of MSPM at Multicians.org

[Peter Flass]

http://www.multicians.org/mspmtoc.html

The photo looks like eight (or nine) volumes. I printed the copy at
Bitsavers, and it came to two binders, each maybe 3" thick.

What's the difference? It looks like the MIT copy is single-sided,
typed on a daisywheel maybe? If so the paper would also be thicker than
xerox paper. Both that version and the Bitsavers version are
non-proportional (IIRC). Does the original have any material that
didn't make it into the Honeywell version?

--
Pete

[Roger A. Roach]

I've not seen what is on Bitsavers, but I don't remember Honeywell
publishing the MSPM. It was really mostly obsolete by the time a
production Multics system was ready. However, there was a lot of
valuable history in the documents. Honeywell (and MIT) did create the
SPS (Systems Programmers Supplement) which was about 2 binders and a
bunch of Program Logic Manuals.

The picture is one of the original MSPM's. There were 9 3" oval ring
binders. These binders were meant to be organized by section for easy
updating and some were very empty. I had inherited 4 copies as the
last person standing at MIT. Olin Sibert and I did scan these and a
lot of other stuff left at MIT before it got trashed. We are not
quite done, but neither of us have had much time in the last 5 years to
complete it. The qualities are not as good as what Bitsavers do, but
it preserved the data.

The MSPS scans we have total 969 files with about 5,600 pages. We
included a fair number of older versions of documents as we did not
want to discard history. They were all printed duplex and I think
were printed with Selectric typeballs.

I do have a copy of the MSPM in my Dropbox folder and would be willing
to share it if you want. It is about 500MB.

Roger

[John W Gintell]

Did you guys scan the MTBs? The MCRs?

John

[Tom Van Vleck]

John Gintell wrote:
> Did you guys scan the MTBs? The MCRs?

There are 57 MTBs online at bitsavers.org, in image-only
PDFs, collected by Brian Redell when he visited MIT in the
70s, and scanned by Al Kossow.

Jerry Saltzer says that the MIT Archives may have copies of
Multics Technical Bulletins, Multics Checkout Bulletins,
Multics Administrative Bulletins, Multics Installation
Bulletins, and Multics Staff Bulletins: some of these
materials may have been damaged by a burst pipe flood in
the 1980s. It would be great if these documents were scanned.

We have the list of MTBs on multicians.org. I have been
looking for at least the list of MCBs and MCRs for
multicians.org for a long time. I think that the TOC of
the MCBs was an MCB. There was also a document that was a
list of the MCRs but I forget how it was disseminated.

[Roger A. Roach]

John,

We did scan the ones we had. If you would like, I could send you a
spreadsheet of the scans.

Roger