Paul, Is this the Lambda/VLSI Design magazine you refer to:
Lynn Conway's VLSI Archive: Main Links (umich.edu) <https://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/VLSI/VLSIarchive.mainlinks.html#VLSIDesMag> ? Thanks! Lee On Thu, May 2, 2024 at 1:00 PM Paul Koning <paulkon...@comcast.net> wrote: > > > > On May 2, 2024, at 3:50 PM, Lee Courtney via cctalk < > cctalk@classiccmp.org> wrote: > > > > The first "professional software" I wrote (almost) out of University in > > 1979 was a package to emulate the mainframe APL\Plus file primitives on a > > CP/M APL variant. Used to facilitate porting of mainframe APL > applications > > to microcomputers. > > > > I'm still an APL adherent since the late 1960s, but it was probably too > > heavy-weight, with obstacles noted elsewhere (character-set, radical > > programming paradigm), to be successful in the early days of > > microcomputing. Although the MCM-70 was an amazing feat of technology. > > > > Too bad because the language itself lends itself to learning by anyone > with > > an understanding of high school algebra. > > The one professional application APL I heard of was in a talk by Ron > Rivest, at DEC around 1982 or so. He described a custom chip he had built, > a bignum ALU (512 bits) to do RSA acceleration. The chip included a chunk > of microcode, and he mentioned that the microcode store layout was done by > an APL program about 500 lines long. That raised some eyebrows... > > Unless I lost it I still have the article somewhere: it's the cover story > on the inaugural issue of "Lambda" which later became "VLSI Design", a > technical journal about chip design. > > My own exposure to APL started around 1998, when I decoded to try to use > it for writing cryptanalysis software. That was for a course in > cryptanalysis taught by Alex Biryukov at Technion and offered to remote > students. The particular exercise was solving an ADVFX cipher (see "The > Code Breakers", the unabridged hardcover, not the useless paperback). It > worked too, and it took less than 100 lines. > > paul > > > -- Lee Courtney +1-650-704-3934 cell
