UNCOL failed because of many reasons, none that I know of. I put the blame on hardware design,throw some logic and memory together CHEAP,QUICK and DIRTY and call it a computer if you can sell one. Call it a computer standard if it for a PHD. Today's memory is loosely based on 8 bit byte addressing, yet there is no Mathematical abstract model to base the computing side of the picture. What are the problems that need to be solved? What are the real world hardware problems like I/O? Are things defined recursivity, in that a simple version, can expand to a complex, and really complex version. Register addressing,base register addressing, array, base register addressing ... Algol 9000. UNCOL is from the era, that it was thought lower cost hardware as gates and memory it would possible have general purpose computer of 32K words or more. 36 bits or bigger word length for single precision floating point. A character set of LATIN upper and lower case letters,and a limited ALGOL 60 character set, like '10' and 'BEGIN' keys.