Yes, it sure is. I was mistaken about it being the first issue. Instead, the
RSA article appears in Vol. 1 No. 3 (4Q80). Too bad the article itself isn't
included in the scanned material.
paul
> On May 2, 2024, at 8:39 PM, Lee Courtney <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> 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 <[email protected]
> <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
>
>
> > On May 2, 2024, at 3:50 PM, Lee Courtney via cctalk <[email protected]
> > <mailto:[email protected]>> 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
