This is related to Algol 60, IMO, not Algol 68. Algol 60 had a big
influence on some machines in the 1960s.
The German mainframe Telefunken TR4, designed in the late 1950s, was a
fully transistorized machine and was for some
years the fastest machine built in Europe. And, as Dijkstra once said,
it was "Algol in Hardware". Some 50 machines
were built and one of them was delivered to the Netherlands (maybe
Delft), that's probably where Dijkstra had a closer look
at this machine.
The offspring TR440 was a time sharing machine with Algol, Fortran, PL/1
(Multics), Pascal (from Zürich), COBOL, BCPL
and was used at German universities until the early 1980s. I worked with
it as a student from 1977 to 1981.
One of the designers of the Telefunken machines was Fritz-Rudolf
Güntsch, who invented "virtual memory"
(some time before it was first used in the Ferranti Atlas computer).
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz-Rudolf_G%C3%BCntsch
(only available in German language, sorry). Güntsch worked with
Rutishauser and Stiefel for some time (at ETH Zürich),
who both had a big influence on the creation of the Algol 60 language.
Kind regards
Bernd
Am 18.03.2024 um 20:47 schrieb Laurence Chiu:
I cut my teeth on Algol also at university - on a Burroughs B6700 mainframe
running MCP. Burroughs at the time were unique in that there was no
assembler language. Everything was written in a HLL, MCP was written in
ESPOL, the compiler for which was written in DCAlgol. That was just Algol
with additional functions for comms handling. Algol was certainly my
favourite language at the time and it was cool that Burroughs even provided
source code for the compiler which was a great learning opportunity for CS
majors.
On Sun, Mar 17, 2024 at 2:33 AM Bob Bridges <
00000587168ababf-dmarc-requ...@listserv.ua.edu> wrote:
I did a lot of coding in Algol during my time at a local University in the
late '70s. My impression at the time was that it had a serious paucity of
built-in functions, but that it enabled me to write my own and make them
easily available to my programs. So I stuffed a library full of I/O and
string-handling functions and got along just fine, it seemed to me.
Haven't encountered it since; I don’t know what advances may have been
made in that arena.
---
Bob Bridges, robhbrid...@gmail.com, cell 336 382-7313
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