And I set up a 918 in someone's house last week so he could practice his
HP3K COBOL for a job interview.
On 8/27/20 4:36 PM, Michael Berkowitz wrote:
> Phhh.. those other languages, COBOL will be there forever and will print the death benefit check from your government when you are no longer forever
>
> Michael Berkowitz | Project Manager
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> -----Original Message-----
> From: HP-3000 Systems Discussion <[log in to unmask]> On Behalf Of Olav Kappert
> Sent: Thursday, August 27, 2020 1:35 PM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: [HP3000-L] [TECH3000] [EXT]: A preview of coming attractions...
>
> CAUTION: This email is from outside CGS. Be careful with links or attachments. Este correo electrónico es de fuera de CGS. Ten cuidado con los enlaces o archivos adjuntos.
>
> First my late Father-in-law was the comptroller for Dominium textiles.
>
> And I remember APL (A Programming Language) well. I used it to a great degree. I was part of a group of elite programmers and did a lot with APL; some normalizing of vectors and even programmed some games. I must have the code somewhere on paper tape. And It was somewhat fact for its time.
>
> The first language I learned was BASIC, then Fortran followed by APL. Once I got that one under my belt, all other language seemed easy.
>
> Olav.
>
> ---- Roy Brown <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>> I figured APL would be your sort of thing, Denys, because it reads from the right 😛
>>
>> Sent from my awesome iPad
>>
>>> On 27 Aug 2020, at 16:49, Denys Beauchemin <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>>>
>>> What a trip down memory lane. I worked with APL in 1976/1977 while I was at Dominion Textiles in Montréal. We used the timesharing service from IPSA (IP Sharp Associates) out of Toronto.
>>> https://nam05.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FI._P._Sharp_Associates&data=02%7C01%7Cmberkowitz%40CGSINC.COM%7Cfbf9803d80164e11a6c808d84ac8adc4%7C0d1ddb6a0fe849d19be97d917d9b18b7%7C0%7C1%7C637341573058554333&sdata=7Tc3aZBzerOWWz0a3xpL67Z6HsmHIUFbhtozk42ei1Y%3D&reserved=0
>>>
>>> Yes, I am actually linking to Roy's preferred (and sole) source of information; Wikipedia.
>>>
>>> I briefly played with APL\3000 and do remember the special version of the 204X that was needed for that.
>>>
>>> Was this really 43 years ago? Wow, how time flies. I discovered about 10 years ago that Domtex had folded toward the end of the last millenium. That was a big textile outfit that got beat up by cheap imports.
>>>
>>> https://nam05.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FDominion_Textile&data=02%7C01%7Cmberkowitz%40CGSINC.COM%7Cfbf9803d80164e11a6c808d84ac8adc4%7C0d1ddb6a0fe849d19be97d917d9b18b7%7C0%7C1%7C637341573058554333&sdata=vS6jfnhNt4uGaery9sZFVtKjByBCI0qYtHqdm%2FlFDys%3D&reserved=0
>>>
>>> Just to keep Roy happy. :-)
>>>
>>> Denys
>>>
>>> -----Original Message-----
>>> From: HP-3000 Systems Discussion [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Roy Brown
>>> Sent: Thursday, August 27, 2020 1:13 AM
>>> To: [log in to unmask]
>>> Subject: Re: [HP3000-L] [TECH3000] [EXT]: A preview of coming attractions...
>>>
>>> I wish Wirt was here to see where Apple is today....
>>>
>>> I used APL back in the 1970’s, but on a big iron IBM run by Boeing, over a remote terminal with one of those phone-in-two-cups things.
>>>
>>> A great language, but notorious for being write-only; you could write a really neat one-liner that nobody could understand. Including yourself after five minutes 😛
>>>
>>> But using APL changes forever the way you think about problems ; take the classic production problem where you have a table of product sales targets by month, and a table of manufacturing resource requirements by product, and you want to know if you have the manufacturing capacity to meet the targets (or you did before you outsourced it all to China, and now you are thinking maybe you need to bring it back home).
>>>
>>> In COBOL, at least two nested loops. In APL, one function. Faced with this today, in Excel, the ex-COBOL programmer will maybe produce a page of VBA. The ex-APL programmer will use a one-liner with MMULT, which encapsulates what was, for us back in the day, APL’s best party trick.
>>>
>>> So while the conventional team had a bumper sticker proclaiming ‘COBOL PROGRAMMERS PERFORM IT VARYING’, we could counter with ‘APL PROGRAMMERS DO IT ON MATRICES’ 😛
>>>
>>> A more obscure APL joke I devised back then :-
>>>
>>> ‘The APL Players proudly present ELEKTRA <- MOURNING by Eugene O’Neill‘
>>>
>>> Best Regards
>>>
>>> Roy
>>>
>>>>>> On 25 Aug 2020, at 00:45, Glenn Cole <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>>>>> Glad you found a fun hobby, Gavin. :)
>>>>>
>>>>> Wow...
>>>>>
>>>>> I wonder if Wirt used APL. Wish he was here to share in the fun...
>>>>>
>>>>> --Glenn
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>> On Aug 24, 2020, at 4:38 PM, Gavin Scott <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>>>>> Yes, the CI executor for the :APL command does not produce the "END OF SUBSYSTEM" that you would normally get from say :BASIC. If you put a program as APL.PUB.SYS you can run it with the :APL command and get no extra output at all, which a few of us made use of over the years. Why APL insists on outputting the message on its own I don't know. It's the only command like this that I know of.
>>>>>
>>>>> Oh, and Stan went searching and found a PDF scan of the ultra-rare APL\3000 reference manual through Al Kossow, so that will be included with my updated virtual Series III distribution.
>>>>>
>>>>> Yes, APL\3000 would like you to have an $8,000 HP2641A APL terminal (with options), but it also fully supports ASCII terminals and a bunch of 3rd party terminals that HP supported in the early days of the 3000 (remember this was the early 1970s). You need the Appendix A in the manual to know that for example in ASCII mode the APL QUAD character (a box) is represented by the three-character string "QD and so forth. Even worse is that APL uses overpunched characters, like QUAD QUOTE which is a box which you have backspaced over and typed a ' character on top of. This is entered in ASCII mode as "QD<backspace>' which leaves "Q' on the screen. Not beautiful. Also, you really want CAPS LOCK ON as lower-case doesn't work for APL expressions, and because of the backspace stuff, you can't use backspace to correct typing errors because things just stack up. You can hit CTRL-Y (CTRL-X does not work because it's playing games with the terminal I/O). It would be neat to find a way to get APL character font I/O to work at some point.
>>>>>
>>>>> G.
>>>>>
>>>>>> On August 24, 2020 at 6:17 PM, Glenn Cole <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Holy heck...I bow in your general direction.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> I only ever read books on APL, but what I read, I enjoyed.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Wasn't there some hack that was done with "APL" on the 3000 ? I mean, not involving the language itself?
>>>>>>
>>>>>> There was something about how it ran that was different from everything else. Maybe it was that it didn't say "END OF PROGRAM" when complete, though Gavin's example does say "END OF SUBSYSTEM" (which itself is kind of interesting).
>>>>>>
>>>>>> --Glenn
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>> On Aug 24, 2020, at 3:53 PM, Gavin Scott <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>>>>>>> It was an amazing implementation for its day, and even still is today to some degree. In addition to the virtual memory that let you have theoretically huge workspaces even on a machine with little memory, it also had a dynamic incremental compiler and associated virtual machine for execution (two of the APL instructions deal directly with executing compiled byte-codes while the rest are various virtual memory read/write/move operations) and it provided not only APL but APLGOL an ALGOL-like language providing control structure for writing APL programs that made them look more like traditional programming languages. They utilized several cutting-edge compiler and memory structuring techniques for performance and space reduction as well, like shared variables with copy-on-write, etc. You can read more about APL\3000 in the HP Journal issue devoted to it from 1975:
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> https://nam05.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.hpl.hp.com%2Fhpjournal%2Fpdfs%2FIssuePDFs%2F1977-07.pdf&data=02%7C01%7Cmberkowitz%40CGSINC.COM%7Cfbf9803d80164e11a6c808d84ac8adc4%7C0d1ddb6a0fe849d19be97d917d9b18b7%7C0%7C1%7C637341573058554333&sdata=k%2B6eBwLQ3pSAQGRNIccKCdfnJcBmVPdycfJ1GViGTbs%3D&reserved=0 (this site's SSL cert has just expired btw)
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> To bring it back from the dead, I ended up doing an all-MPE implementation of the APL instructions by hacking the MPE V/R (the version that runs on Dave Bryan's 3000 simulator) ININ.PUB.SYS (Internal Interrupt handler)'s unimplemented instruction trap and I'm able to treat these instructions the same way that MPE handles the extended COBOLII instruction set when that's not installed. It has taken a week or so to get it to the point that this morning it looked like everything was working (I've since found a couple glitches, but in general it's usable). The ironic thing is that after talking about finding a way to make APL work for the last 40 years, I ended up doing it in a way that would have worked in 1980 too :p
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Of course, the right way to do it is to implement the APL instructions inside Dave Bryan's Series III simulator so we can get it to run at maximum speed (probably at least 100x faster than my version) and I think it might actually have really good performance compared to any modern APL at that point! Stan is doing some investigation in that area, so maybe we will get a super-fast APL yet.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> I'll have a new "My Series III 1.4" in the next day or so that includes APL, and also implements a brand new "Series III+" if you will, that has had the BANK addressing in the hardware expanded from 4 to 6 bits, so it can support up to 8MB of memory rather than the 2MB limit of the original hardware! This is the same memory limit that MPE IV had on a Series 64. It makes quite a nice little system.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> G.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> On August 24, 2020 at 4:12 PM, Brian Duncombe <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> REALLY SAD !
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> I was at HP Toronto when this stuff came over the hill.
>>>>>>>> One of the SE’s in the Ottawa office was an APL advocate. He got me to play with it but I didn’t really have time to do much. It also isn’t the kind of language that I like.
>>>>>>>> The creator of APL, a Canadian I believe, said that the HP3000 implimentation was the best that he had seen. The only other platform that I was aware of was the IBM 360/370/43xx/ but there were a number of users on that platform running APL around here. The fact that HP put in so much effort, didn’t make the instructions standard when the 33/44/48/…. came out sunk the project. I wonder who had championed it within HP before the “Pascal is the only language” sect came to power within HP.
>>>>>>>> brian
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>> On Aug 24, 2020, at 4:57 PM, Gavin Scott <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>>>>>>>>> Well, NOBODY has used APL in about 40 years, since it was only ever supported on the Series II/III which required special firmware to implement the ten extra CPU instructions that APL required (it had a 32-bit virtual memory system at a time when the maximum system memory was something like 802,816 bytes!)
>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>> HP lost interest in APL due to its poor initial performance and it got a bad reputation internally (with sales in particular) even in the face of several years of work to enhance and improve it. By 1980 or so HP pretty much decided to pretend that it did not exist. Since it could only ever run on an early machine with special microcode firmware installed, and HP never implemented those ten APL instructions on any other model of HP-3000, APL\3000 became this fabled thing, only whispered about in legends.
>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>> Until today :)
>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>> G.
>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>> On August 24, 2020 at 3:40 PM, Craig Lalley <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>> I never used APL, so I had to try.
>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>> :apl
>>>>>>>>>> This command is no longer supported in MPE/iX. (CIERR 9103)
>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>> Gonna need your emulator!
>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>> -Craig
>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>> On Monday, August 24, 2020, 01:16:39 PM PDT, Gavin Scott <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>> External Email
>>>>>>>>>> :APL
>>>>>>>>>> APL\3000 HP32105A.01.05 (C)HEWLETT-PACKARD CO. 1979
>>>>>>>>>> 15:08 08/24/92
>>>>>>>>>> 2+2
>>>>>>>>>> 4
>>>>>>>>>> 3*3
>>>>>>>>>> 27
>>>>>>>>>> S _ 'Hello TECH3000! '
>>>>>>>>>> S
>>>>>>>>>> Hello TECH3000!
>>>>>>>>>> S,S,S
>>>>>>>>>> Hello TECH3000! Hello TECH3000! Hello TECH3000!
>>>>>>>>>> )CLEAR
>>>>>>>>>> CLEAR WS
>>>>>>>>>> )OFF
>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>> END OF SUBSYSTEM
>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>> :
>>>>>>>>>> This message is not from a UTC.EDU address. Caution should be used in clicking links and downloading attachments from unknown senders or unexpected email.
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--
Tracy Johnson
BT
NNNN
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