[SPG_Active_Members] Fw: Here it is! - APL for the Burroughs B5500

[Lee Courtney (ACM)]

Hi all,

Great news - Nigel Williams et al have successfully located and digitized the original University of Washington implementation of APL for the Burroughs B5500. Who would have thought that in 2013 we'd be able to recover source code for APL from the late-1960s/early-1970s! 

I have uploaded the source code to CHM's Software Preservation web-site. In addition, I've uploaded the original Tech. Report from Gary Kildall (pre-CPM era) describing the system, user manual from Georgia Tech and Nigel's announcement email. It joins the source code for APL implementations for the SDS Sigma Series and Paul McJones micro-coded APL from Berkeley.

Thanks for Nigel, Paul and Ed for excellent computer history sleuthing and hard work to pull this work together. Awesome work!

Cheers,
 
Lee Courtney


----- Forwarded Message -----
From: Nigel Williams <nw at retrocomputingtasmania.com>
To: Nigel Williams <nw at retrocomputingtasmania.com>; Paul Kimpel <paul.kimpel at digm.com> 
Sent: Saturday, September 7, 2013 11:15 PM
Subject: Here it is! - APL for the Burroughs B5500
 

Paul Kimpel has deftly completed a scan of the source-code listing of
the UW CSG APL for the Burroughs B5500 and it can now be downloaded
from here (43 megabyte PDF 89 pages):

http://www.phkimpel.us/APL-B5500-Listing-19710111.pdf

We added a cover page with details and several corrections to
compensate for minor imperfections due to the available scanning
equipment. With these corrections and some careful attention the
listing is 100% complete and a solid basis for transcribing.

I urge everyone to grab a copy and share the link with whomever so it
can be scattered far and wide, the more copies the better;  hopefully
far into the future copies will be easily found rather than relying on
the serendipitous chain of events we have experienced over the last
few months.

I would also direct everyone to the GeorgiaTech user manual for their
version of this APL. The GeorgiaTech document also has an interesting
comparison between APL\360 and APL/B5500.

http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/georgiaTech/Georgia_Tech_B5500_APL_Aug71.pdf

Thanks again to Ed Vandergriff for preserving this implementation of
APL. This has been an unexpectedly rapid recovery; some historic
software artefacts seem to yield themselves up quicker than expected,
others remain stubbornly and persistently missing.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: ../attachments/20130908/c033f1a8/attachment.html