Undergrads

An excellent documentary on the genesis of BASIC (with just a touch of chest-thumping on the part of Dartmouth College).

CHUNK

Matt Parker breaks down his supporters' efforts to optimize the Jotto Problem. Rust and Julia are two of the languages used, but C++ was a favorite of the record holders.

BWK

Brian Kernighan, who put the K in awk, is still patching it, in this case to provide Unicode and CSV support.

Archives

The Association for Computing Machinery is rolling out open access to its back catalog, as Ernie Smith reports.

Care for a game?

Betsy Golden Kellem reminds us that Elektro wasn't the only box of electronics and blinking lights on display at the 1939 New York World's Fair. There was also The Nimatron.

Green and black

Rich Maddison of the RAF keeps his flight log on a Psion 5 -- and other vintage technologists, as reported by Michael Dempsey.

B200

A good skim of the history of selling computers via advertising, from Ryan Mungia.

... a striking Burroughs ad from 1964 shows a dramatically-lit photo of its B200 system with the headline, “angry young computer.” Beneath is a short bit of copy, which describes how the B200 can “outdo any computer in its class” and “gets angry” (just like a human!) when people purchase other machines “on the basis of name or initials.” Without mentioning IBM by name, the ad pokes fun at the industry leader while simultaneously touting its own brand in a witty way.

Syntax quibble

Richard Jensen traces the roots of Brian Kernighan's and Dennis Ritchie's C back to Christopher Strachey (nephew to Blooomsburyite Lytton) through SMALGOL and an abandoned project, BCPL.

BCPL is a “bootstrap” language because its compiler is capable of self-compiling. Essentially, a small chunk of the BCPL compiler was written in assembly or machine code, and the rest of the compiler would be written in a corresponding subset of BCPL. The section of the compiler written in BCPL would be fed into the section written in assembly code, and the resultant compiler program could be used to compile any program written in BCPL.

An intermediate step in the development was B.

Scripting languages such as PHP and JavaScript contain bits of programming shorthand that [Ken] Thompson originally developed in order to fit B into the limited memory of the PDP-7. Two examples are the “++” and “--” increment and decrement operators. With only 4k to play around with, shortening “x=x+1” to “x++” saved a not inconsiderable amount of space.

German and Connecticut

Ken Shirriff prints a visualization of the Mandelbrot fractal with an IBM 1401 and peripherals at the Computer History Museum.

The 1401 didn't need to be programmed in assembly language - it supports languages such as Fortran and COBOL - but I wanted the full 1401 experience. It does amaze me though that you can run a COBOL compiler on a machine with just 4,000 characters of memory.

Greg would not be amused

Recollections by women technologists at the National Security Agency in the 1960s-1980s. Training, learning, perfecting.

Early variable-naming conventions:

The library books said I could name my variables anything I wanted. I took this to heart and called them names from the book I was reading, The Hobbit. Thus, “BILBO” became the second counter. Eventually, the person guiding me looked at my work and gently mentioned that it was traditional to name the variables after the function they performed so other people could follow the program.

And a new patching technique:

My first programming experience was assembly language on a CP818 (UNIVAC 1224) for field installation. We “wrote” our programs on a Kleinschmidt—something like a typewriter, but it produced punched paper tape with one instruction per line (e.g., “clear register”). You could fix an error by wrapping Scotch tape over the holes in the line and repunching the line! Fortunately, the readers were not sensitive to the opacity of the tape, just the holes. The resulting paper tape was wrapped butterfly style in a figure eight with a paper clip in the center and stored until you had time on the computer.

Tale of the tape

Algol 60: the Velvet Underground of programming languages.

It never went away

John Delany reports that COBOL is back.

It is estimated $3 trillion in daily commerce flows through COBOL systems, while 95% of ATM swipes and 80% of in-person banking transactions rely on COBOL code.

Patch

Frank O'Brien explains, in exceptional detail, the hardware problem that vexed the Apollo 14 mission, and the dance of software fixes that kept the Moon landing on track. TIL about core rope memory.

777

At Living Computers: Museum + Labs, a DEC PDP-7 bootstrapping and running UNIX Version 0.

Special guest appearance by a strip of paper tape.

Grand master

Fernando Corbató, pioneer of interactive computing and Turing laureate, has passed.

In this video from 1963, Corbató describes state-of-the art batch processing using mag tape, offloading input-output to an IBM 1620.

Cookbooks

ICYMI: An excerpt from Clive Thompson's forthcoming story of the loss of women from the ranks of coders, commencing in about 1984.

Against linkrot

Some time ago (March 2012), the Goodwill Computer Museum in Austin morphed into the Museum of Computer Culture.

Natural

Ben Allen unpacks how the English-ish syntax of FLOW-MATIC and COBOL induced adoption by 1950s-era managers.

... the appearance of the language allowed managers to more easily understand what sort of thing a program was, even if it did not allow non-programmers to completely understand what any given piece of code actually did.

In particular, he considers why Grace Hopper's proposal for French- and German-based syntax fell flat.

For Hopper, as for UNIVAC itself, programming language keywords were just labels given to bit patterns, labels that were freely interchangeable between each other. But when labeled in certain familiar ways, these bit patterns could become a source of budget increases. When implemented and marketed to customers, not as bit patterns but as things that look like English, they could result in sales. When they displayed just enough flexibility, they moved the line of what could get funding. When they displayed too much unexpected flexibility, they lost funding. Keywords were just a code, just bit patterns—but what they looked like was, at times, more important than what they were.

Xanadu

Ted Nelson, coiner of the term hypertext, reflects on the lessons of computing's brief history.

Forethought

David C. Brock explains how we ended up with PowerPoint.