HP 3000, APL\3000, the HP 2641A APL Display Station, and stuff.

Gavin Scott gavin at learn.bio
Wed Sep 30 17:46:30 CDT 2020


Eric wrote:
> There was IBM APL\1130 version 2, introduced in 1969.

It's actually sorta annoying when you discover how much HP copied from
IBM in those days. The first giveaway is that APL\3000 has a backslash
in the product name when everything else was a forward slash as in
BASIC/3000, FORTRAN/3000, and even RPG/3000 (which was another
functional copy of an IBM product), and of course this is likely
because of APL\360. Most people, even inside HP, started calling it
APL/3000 almost immediately though.

APL\3000 is supposed to be a functional superset of IBM APL SV
(APL\360 with Shared Variables etc.) and HP advertised it as such.

The other one that took me a while to notice is the HP 2641A APL
Display Station that came out after the 2640 and 2645. That
out-of-order numbering was kind of interesting until you discover that
the IBM Selectric-based printing terminal with the APL type ball was
the IBM 2741 (sigh).


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