3 May
2024
3 May
'24
12:39 a.m.
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 <paulkoning(a)comcast.net> wrote:
--
Lee Courtney
+1-650-704-3934 cell
On May 2, 2024, at 3:50 PM, Lee Courtney via
cctalk <
cctalk(a)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