This is getting a bit more off-topic for python-dev than I'd like. I will make a couple comments though, then hopefully be done with this thread.
The original ones are here: http://ftp.fi.netbsd.org/pub/misc/archive/alt.sources/volume91/Feb/ Look at http://ftp.fi.netbsd.org/pub/misc/archive/alt.sources/index.gz for the associating subjects with file names. As far as I can tell, they extract flawlessly using unshar.
Thanks. Will check them out.
When I see diffs like this (your git vs. the unshar result) I tend to trust unshar more:
... Well, sure. I was trying to reverse engineer the original shar files from Google's HTML. I was frankly fairly surprised that I got as close to perfection as I did. I realized that Google had mangled Guido's old CWI email, but didn't worry about it. I also saw the TeX macro mangling, but as I wasn't planning to rebuild the documentation, I didn't worry too much about that. I expected to need a bunch of manual patchwork to get back to something that would even compile. It's nice to know that in this case, "the Internet never forgets." Skip