This really has been posted here a lot - Well, for those following along at home, this story actually got a relatively recent update - as of this spring, the 1/10-scale Cray-1A is now residing next to its bigger self in the Computer History Museum in Mountain View!
Did the FOIA requests include NSA? You’d want a copy of FOLKLORE if it’s releasable; there’s at least one Cryptolog article about it that’s been declassified.
It did! I actually got a nice reply from Whitfield Diffie, basically saying "Haha, no." They have what amounts to a never-declassify-anything-digital policy. I got a similar letter from the NNSA.
Through a friend-of-a-friend, I did actually manage to get a copy of the source code to CTSS, the cray time sharing system, on microfiche from Lawrence Livermore National Lab, and I even had it digitized (but not OCR'd), but it's written in a language called COMPASS i've never found a compiler for.
COMPASS was the name of the assembler language for the earlier supercomputers that Seymour Cray designed while he was still working at CDC, such as the CDC 6000-series:
> They have what amounts to a never-declassify-anything-digital policy
From what I've heard, part of it relates to volume. If someone asks to declassify a single page document, it is pretty easy to evaluate it and decide whether it can be released or not. Presented with thousands of pages of old source code, it is an immense undertaking. Added to that, people don't understand the old source code any more, and worry that there might be something lurking hidden in there that should not be released, but they might not notice it due to not understanding it.
I hope at least they never destroy any of this old stuff, and maybe one day (even if only decades or centuries from now) the US government will decide that enough time has gone past that it no longer could pose any risk.
Great project! I went down a similar path some years ago and ran into the same limitation with lack of any existing software. Very cool that you've got a chance of digging up COS!
We successfully recovered it, actually (although it turns out we couldn't find enough software for it to be interesting). My cray-buddy Andras has a great write-up on all of the work he's done on software recovery and writing a C++ simulator of all of this stuff: https://www.modularcircuits.com/blog/articles/the-cray-files...
"It is a mix of FORTRAN source code and Cray Assembly Language (CAL), and looks like it supports the Cray 1, Cray X-MP, and Cray Y-MP machines, and possibly a SPARC machine."
