So do you have any recommendations for specific stuff to read for the rest of us... Pretty please? :)

For starters,

Xerox stuff for Interlisp-D, Smalltalk, Mesa and Mesa/Cedar,

https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_xerox

ETHZ Research

https://people.inf.ethz.ch/wirth/

https://www.research-collection.ethz.ch/handle/20.500.11850/...

"NEWP Programming Reference Manual" for ClearPath MCP (nee Burroughs B5000 in 1961)

https://public.support.unisys.com/aseries/docs/clearpath-mcp...

https://www.smecc.org/The%20Architecture%20%20of%20the%20Bur...

Check IBM's RISC research with PL/8, before they decided to create Aix instead.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PL/8

Then you can follow up on Singularity, Midori and Barrelfish for the more up to date stuff

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/singularity...

http://joeduffyblog.com/2015/11/03/blogging-about-midori/

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/barrelfish/

And their fruits into mainstream Windows

https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Build/2012/3-005

https://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/Going+Deep/Mani-Ramaswamy-an...

https://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/Going+Deep/Inside-NET-Native

There is plenty more, however I think you can already lose yourself in such information. :)

Don't forget about Symbolics stuff: http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/symbolics/

That was a lot more than I expected! Thank you very much! I'll take the dive in later!

There's also a service now for people who want to check out MULTICS:

https://ban.ai/multics/

With the main site https://multicians.org/, being full of nice histories, including how much safer Multics was versus UNIX, thanks to PL/I strong typing.

https://multicians.org/b2.html

I was going to suggest to anyone interested in VMS to head over to the deathrow cluster but unfortunately it's now dead. https://deathrow.vistech.net/410.html

BLISS links from Wikipedia are still working

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BLISS

And there is https://www.vmssoftware.com/documents_list.html

>BLISS links from Wikipedia are still working

>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BLISS

Interesting. I remember Jon Bentley [1] mentions BLISS multiple times in his book Writing Efficient Programs.

The book is a gold mine of software performance tuning techniques (with recommendations on when to use them or not), organized in the form of many numbered and well-named "rules" (so that you can remember when to apply them) about saving time or space, or trading space for time or vice versa, all with plenty of examples and "war stories". The book also talks about working at many levels of the stack (although most of the focus is at the level of program code), all the way from hardware up to algorithms.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Bentley_(computer_scientis...

I took a brief look at the BLISS language, and I have to say that it does seem a bit verbose, though in general, in the larger scheme of things, that may not matter, given other qualities of a language, or may even be an advantage over more cryptic or concise languages.

there's also the hobbyist license + SIMH, and hopefully the amd64 port any day now (though that will sadly probably still be for-fee)