Rich kids are into COBOL

From: Peter Corlett Sent: Saturday, February 28, 2015 11:47 AM In 1979, Iverson was doing a retrospective on APL for his Turing Award. The language was ~15 years old at the time; his book _A Mathematical Notation_ was nearly 20. The language was hardly novel, being used for real world work by then. I was first exposed to APL at the Computer Assisted Instruction Laboratory at the University of Texas in the autumn of 1969, on a System/360 Model 50 and an IBM 1500 (an 1800 running Coursewriter II as its OS). APL\360 and APL\1500 were similar but not identical. I thought it an interesting toy. I encountered APLSF on the DEC-20 at UChicago while in grad school, c. 1978. In 1983, I shared an office at UChicago with a gent who made a good living at an investment bank programming in APL. It was he to told me about geek challenges of the form "I bet you can't tell me what this APL one-liner does!" I told him that my response would always be "You're right!" If you're going to offer a critique of an historical paper, be sure of your history first. Rich Rich Alderson Vintage Computing Sr. Systems Engineer Living Computer Museum 2245 1st Avenue S Seattle, WA 98134 mailto:RichA at LivingComputerMuseum.org http://www.LivingComputerMuseum.org/