DavidMorano
commented
5 months ago Hello maixo9, very nice to hear from you,
it would be nice to know what were they compiled for as far as OS/architecture.
They (the binaries) were compiled for a "sparc" architecture (pretty sure it was 'sparc-v8'). Most are ELF (SysV) binaries probably compiled for Sun-Microsystems Solaris 2.4. But a few of the binaries were compiled for one of the later versions of SunOS 1.4.x. These date from no later than probably about 1995 ('sparc-v9' debuted about 1995 also); the binaries may possibly be even earlier, from as early as possibly 1992 or 1993.
Or better yet is the source code available so they can be compiled for new OS and/or architectures?
Very sadly, I have no source for these. At the time, AT&T (Bell Laboratories) did not make the source code for these readily available for regular consumers (like me). AT&T did not even make the source code (TROFF-MAN) for the manual pages available; being only pre-roffed into what is in the distribution now.
I also worked at Bell Labs, Lucent, Alcatel-Lucent and ultimately Nokia (for a few weeks) from 1990 - 2015 and know of the use and importance of these tools.
Nice to meet a fellow Bell-Laber-Lucent-er. I joined Bell-Labs (might have been called Bell-Telephone-Laboratories in those days, not sure) in 1982, and moved or renamed to AT&T Bell Laboratories (whenever that began). And moved to Lucent whenever that was spun off. And further moved to another partial spin-off that eventually became known as Philips Consumer Communications, a joint subsidiary of Lucent and Philips (of the Netherlands).
I have another old Bell Labs code distribution (not readily available) called NCMP. This was similar to the EXPTOOLS distribution in some ways (also no source code). It was also distributed for internal use (like EXPTOOLS was). I would have to dig it out of old stored disk drives to grab that (if someone ever wanted it for some very important reason). It is also compiled for 'sparc'. I think that this distribution (NCMP) had some tools that were also open-source at the time. Many of those are likely still open-source and available (in much better form, I would imagine) as open-source tools today. I think that a few of the EXPTOOLS tools were also open-source and may continue to be available as such to this day. One would have to do a search of the web to find one of those old tools if you really wanted it (but most probably lost to history).
Further, I had a partial copy of some elements of some other Bell-Labs tools-program distribution (I think it was called USTOP), but that got lost. The elements of that distribution required paying for them (back to the Labs organization that controlled-maintained them). I bought -- or 'rented' really -- some of those tools. But in my experience, many of those tools were very badly written and often completely unusable. They were distributed in source code form, and I tried fixing some of them. But they were so horribly written that I never got them working properly. One of those was the old TECO editor, originally from Digital Equipment Corp (in C-lang rather than PDP-11 assembly). It was so horribly written that I never was able to get the crashes out of it, despite some meaningful refactoring (it was in no way my job to clean up old trash code like that). I think that there are modern TECO implementations out there today, if someone is really interested.
Can you help?
I am sorry that I cannot help further. Maybe someday someone who has the source code to EXPTOOLS (and possibly other old AT&T tools-code) will make it available on the web someplace. If you find some or all of the old source code to any AT&T distribution (EXPTOOLS or otherwise), drop a comment here with the location for me and others to pick up on. There are a few old AT&T tools that I wish I had today (but do not), but I have had to make do. For one example, there was an old AT&T documentation tool named "TAG" (used as a "filter" with TROFF) that allowed one to reference figures and tables and such in TROFF or TROFF-MAN pages from other places in the document, but I never found the source code to that. I ended up writing it from scratch myself (with some enhancements). I miss a few other oldies also.
I put up this old EXPTOOLS distro as primarily a record for history. In my experience, AT&T had a myriad of tool software (of a variety of sorts) that never made it out to the world. I think that this was a loss to the world. For example, besides the original simple AT&T MAKE program (that many people know and love to this day), and besides NMAKE (that did make it out), AT&T had other software-build tools (systems really) that were sort of the equivalent of CMake and other modern variants. Other examples: a distributed document database storage and retrieval systems (electronic document library management), an elaborate source code control system (similar to GIT now-a-days), and more. I think that much of old AT&T tool-code (and other code) is likely totally lost to history.
Regards.
There are several binary tools in this collection and it would be nice to know what were they compiled for as far as OS/architecture. Or better yet is the source code available so they can be compiled for new OS and/or architectures?
I also worked at Bell Labs, Lucent, Alcatel-Lucent and ultimately Nokia (for a few weeks) from 1990 - 2015 and know of the use and importance of these tools.
Can you help?