Sorry for this off-topic posting, but with all the recent talk about Intel's history of x86 development, I was wondering whether there are any "Intel connected" people around here who might know what happened to the source code for Intel's PL/M-86, ASM86 and iAPX-86 Utilities (LINK86, LOC86, LIB86, CREF86 and OH86). The manuals for many of these are on Bitsavers.
I have used both the DOS-hosted and VAX/VMS hosted versions of these tools, but when Y2K was approaching I reached out to Intel to see if we could obtain the source code under some sort of license (given that these products weren't being sold anymore) that would allow us to modify it for Y2K just to tidy up the generated compiler listing files, linker map files, etc., which were the only real place dates and times were used. The reply I got from Intel was basically stating that this was "lost" and no-one knew what became of it. And now, with the switch to x64, Windows 7.x and later Windows incarnations no longer support running the old 16-bit DOS executables in a 64-bit environment, other than resorting to virtually hosted DOS using DOSbox, VirtualBox or similar. PL/M-86 was never (to my knowledge) used to build a widely-used operating system in the way its predecessor PL/M-80 was used to build the early CP/M 1.x and 2.0, so it never quite got as much attention as "piece of computing history". We also used PL/M-80 under ISIS-II on Intel's iPDS and MDS-80 development workstations, PL/M-80 under iSIM85 ISIS-II emulator on DOS/Windows 16/32-bit, as well as PL/M-51 under DOS/Windows 16/32-bit. There were also PL/M-286 and PL/M-386 varieties, and possibly PL/M-48 (?) though I never personally used them. Interestingly, I just discovered that there was a PL/M-VAX version (see http://www.cpm.z80.de/source.html ) that was written in Fortran and emits VAX instructions. From looking at that source it looks like that was something done by National Energy Software Center at the Argonne National Laboratory using Intel code from 1981 as a starting point. I probably should have thought of asking on the SIMH e-mail list years ago ! Perhaps someone on this list has connections at Intel (or used to work there) and maybe this source code really does exist in either the corporate archives or in some private or museum collection. Cheers Jason A.
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