Joey's take on all this is fairly dead on.
I forgot about the DOS-ly part of the Xerox install - a bit
later on, Xerox bought themselves an ITEL AS-6 (an S/370
knock-off) and I ended up writing the OS machine check handler
for it, because IBM had abandoned DOS by then, and ITEL would
not supply it. When I turned it on, the machine started taking
soft machine checks at about 10Hz, due to dead storage cards
in the box. When I brought this up with Xerox management
(and Itel field engineers), Itel claimed that this was
"normal" and that I should disable reporting soft errors.
I claimed that the failures were solid, and that a soft
failure in the same storage area would take the machine down
hard. Management bought their story and demanded, not
very gently, that I disable reporting of soft errors.
[This is sort of like
letting the Titanic keep sailing, as long as the pumps
are working...] Which I did. And they went on the air
with the box, and after it crashed way too many times
too quickly, Itel came in and replaced said dead cards.
And then there are the Hitachi tales. As Joey says,
these are best served over beer. And the IPSA takeover
by Reuters, which quickly soured excellent long-term relations
between IPSA and Hitachi. It's too bad IPSA couldn't
have been acquired by Hitachi instead. Much more civilized
people...
Whoever wrote the wikpedia piece also missed (besides a lot
of other stuff...) the fact that 666 box existed along time
before Leslie had any involvement with it. I think it was
there in 1971, when I started.
All corporate internal business was handled through the mailbox.
When someone started sending spam to large groups of people,
about important topics like the colors of the hangers used
to store backup tapes, Ian felt compelled to send out the
following message, which I paraphrase because I don't have
the original at hand:
- People who abuse the mailbox by sending messages to
large groups will have their email addresses revoked.
- People without email addresses are of marginal utility
to the company.
Problem fixed.
Bob
Joey K Tuttle wrote:
> I would agree with the earlier dates (and Roger's comments). Maybe
> Eric could put a reasonable date on it. The Wikipedia article has
> several questionable statements in it. The guy who originally posted
> it is someone in Toronto that I don't know - but he has an
> "interesting" view of the structure of the company etc....
>
> in 1978 I was involved in negotiations with Hitachi Corp. wherein
> they were interested in licensing SAPL - the work for MVS had been
> done, and we had even come to agreement on a price, but the deal
> breaker was that they wanted it running under TSO... They ended up
> implementing their own version under TSO and then we sold them some
> application systems in 1979. I have some interesting stories about
> all that, but I think they may be best left as "over a beer"
> stories...
>
> However, Xerox had an in-house system several years before that. Just
> that it, as did that version of the time sharing system run by IPSA,
> required a DOS System/360 rather than MVT or MFT - that is, pretty
> much a dedicated machine. By the late 70's most data centers had
> moved away from DOS.
>
> Maybe Catherine Lathwell can record some of these stories in her
> quest to document the early history of APL. I'll Bcc her on this
> message in case she doesn't lurk the j forums...
>
> At 12:30 -0700 2009/03/09, Tracy Harms wrote [to jchat]:
>> Catherine Lathwell's APL Diaries are available here:
>>
>> http://aprogramminglanguage.wordpress.com/
>>
>> She intends to make a documentary film about the history of APL, and
>> is asking for sources of information and ideas for that project.
>
> Catherine's blog entries are good reading and she is accumulating a
> lot of history.
>
> - joey
>
>
> At 22:04 -0400 2009/08/31, Devon McCormick wrote:
>> Joey - according to Wikipedia, Sharp APL was available as an "in-house"
>> product in 1980. This raises the question of what date to use - that of the
>> internal system or one publicly available. I've been tending to the earlier
>> date.
>>
>> On Mon, Aug 31, 2009 at 1:22 AM, Joey K Tuttle <[email protected]> wrote:
>>
>>> Devon,
>>>
>>> Nice that you're doing this.
>>>
>>> The IBM 5100 was APL.SV rather than APL\360 - it was indeed in 1975.
>>> I think one of the astonishing things about the 5100 is that the IBM
>>> Rochester department that developed it had only 8 regular employees.
>>> Another interesting fact is that when the 5110 came out with disk
>>> storage, a 3.5 inch technology from Sony (that showed up 10 years
>>> later in PCs) was rejected because it was "too far out" - instead the
>>> already in use IBM 8 inch floppy was used...
>>>
>>> Sharp APL came considerably earlier than 1979. Actually in 1978 or 79
>>> Sharp APL had dial up access in Moscow - as well as many other places
>>> around the world. STSC's first time sharing service was run on a
>>> machine at I.P. Sharp Associates, the development of the APL file
>>> system was a shared project. Considerable history of the Sharp
>>> network (along with contemporary other networks) can be found at
>>> http://www.rogerdmoore.ca/ the wikipedia page
>>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I._P._Sharp_Associates is interesting
>>> and partly accurate ...
>>>
>>> There is active interest in APL and time lines like this at
>>> http://www.computerhistory.org/ (whose server has been down today...)
>>>
>>> - joey
>>>
>>>
>>> At 00:03 -0400 2009/08/31, Devon McCormick wrote:
>>> >Thanks for the reminder - and a belated happy birthday to J!
>>> >
>>> >This is a good intro for something I'm working on for the Ken Iverson page
>>> >for the ACM's Turing Award winners web pages. There's a section I'm on
>>> now
>>> >for APL systems in chronological order. I've asked APL vendors to
>>> >contribute a few lines about their respective systems but it's mostly
>>> meant
>>> >as an historical perspective.
>>> >
>>> >I'd like some help with dates and any systems I've missed. For instance,
>>> >Wikipedia mentions systems by Burroughs, CDC, and other mainframe
>>> companies
>>> >with whose APLs I am unfamiliar.
>>> >
>>> >Here's what I have so far:
>>> >
>>> >[1964] I.P. Sharp Associates: developed early packet switching computer
>> > >networking system known as IPSANET, and a global e-mail system.
>> Purchased
>>> >in 1987[?] by Reuters.
>>> >[1966] APL\360
>>> >[1967] APL\1130
>>> >[1969] Scientific Time-Sharing Corporation
>>> >[1973] APL.SV: introduces shared variables.
>>> >[1973] 8008-based MCM/70
>>> >[1975?] APL\360 on the 5100
>>> >[?] Burroughs APL\700
>>> >[1977] 8080-based "small APL" called EMPL
>>> >[1977] Z-80-based TIS APL
>>> >[1978] PDP / LSI-11 implementmentation of APL
>>> >[1979] Sharp APL
>>> >[1981?] IBM VSAPL
>>> >[1982?] APL.68000 for Motorola 68000
>>> >[1983?] Analogic's APL machine
>>> >[1982] APL*PLUS PC
>>> >[1983?] NARS2000: open source APL interpreter written by Bob Smith.
>>> >[1983?] MicroAPL's APLX
>>> >[1984] IBM APL2
>>> >[1985] Dyalog
>>> >[1988] Timothy A. Budd's "An APL compiler"
>>> >[1987] Rationalized APL
>>> >[1988] A+
>>> >[1989] J Software
>>> >[1990] ACORN: APL to C On Real Numbers - a prototype APL to C compiler.
>>> >[1993] K
>>> >[1995] APL2000
>>> >[?] APL to C# translator from Causeway Graphical Systems
>>> >[?] Bob Bernecky's APEX compiler
>>> >
>>> >Any help, especially with references, would be appreciated. As you can
>>> see,
>>> >some of them - I'm looking at you "Sharp" - are particularly difficult to
>>> >pin down.
>>> >
>>> >Thanks,
>>> >
>>> >Devon
>>> >
>>> >On Sun, Aug 30, 2009 at 8:07 PM, PackRat <[email protected]> wrote:
>>> >
>>> >> Three days ago, August 27 (about 4pm), was the 20th anniversary of the
>>> >> "birth" of J <http://www.jsoftware.com/jwiki/Essays/Incunabulum>, and
>>> >> it has grown and developed ever since. I don't know if the developers
>>> >> of J consider that the "birthdate", but it makes a lot of sense to me.
>>> >> Happy birthday, J!
>>> >>
>>> >> Harvey
>> > >>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
>
----------------------------------------------------------------------
For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
