In honor and in celebration of the 50-th anniversary of APL:
*A History of APL in 50 Functions* <http://www.jsoftware.com/papers/50>
*Some Exercises in APL Language Design*
<http://www.jsoftware.com/papers/APLDesignExercises.htm>
It was Sunday, November 27, 1966, the Thanksgiving holiday weekend in the
United States. But the APL implementers were working. The fruits of their
labor were recorded for posterity:
)load 1 cleanspace
SAVED 1966-11-27 15.53.59 (GMT-7)
1 cleanspace had a saved timestamp that was carefully preserved from one
release to the next, from one version to the next, from one APL to the next.
The time is actually off by 1 second. As Dick Lathwell recounted
<http://www.jsoftware.com/papers/APLQA.htm#APL_birthday>:
Trivia trivia: The timestamp on 1 cleanspace is actually 1 second later
than the original. Some time after the implementation of )clear, Adin
dropped1 cleanspace. He then had second thoughts, so I set the time and
date of the model 50 to the original timestamp with the clock disabled and
started APL and entered)save 1 cleanspace. The implementation of our
supervisor (I guess these days we would say kernel) was such that an
interval timer interrupt was required to enter the scheduler, so I
momentarily enabled the clock.
For more stories from that time, see *The Socio-Technical Beginnings of APL*
<http://www.jsoftware.com/papers/eem/socio.htm>.
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