[IP] more on snobol & java
Begin forwarded message:
From: Bob Frankston <Bob2-19-0501@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: July 25, 2006 11:57:31 PM EDT
To: "'John Shoch'" <shoch@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Cc: Dave Farber <dave@xxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: RE: [IP] more on snobol & java
Memories memories ... I hesitate to send this because it’s so
incomplete and I fear generating thousands of responses from those of
us young enough to remember those days.
I remember using Snobol a high school student using the IBM 7094 at
NYU – probably around 1965. We would place the binary deck for
SNOBOL3 – a few inches of cards – in front of the few cards for our
own programs. Copying the deck was a challenge – the 519 wasn’t up to
the task so we’d have to submit a job to get a copy of the deck.
Gio Wiederhold – I remember visiting in 1971 to evaluate a start-up
he was involved in and learning about his ACME terminals which had
lights showing if you program was swapped in and running or waiting.
Also visited Butler Lampson at Xerox PARC – he had consulted for
White-Weld where helped on the SDS-940 and designed the financial
language for the online service. The implementation of which paid for
much of my college education.
It wasn’t that long ago was it?
It was sort of like Precambrian period in evolution – there were many
experiments in programming and languages. There was more than a
enough to study in the history of programming languages class I took
in 1966.
So many operating systems and machine architectures with bit lengths
from 8 (on that new fangled IBM 360) to the common 36 bit machines to
the 60 bits on the CDC 6x00 machines. The roots of timesharing with
CTSS at MIT begetting Multics and then Unix. In that same building at
545 Tech Square CP/CMS was prototyped on the IBM 360/47 (one of a
kind) and shipped on the 360/67 which we used at Interactive Data
(spun out of White Weld where we started on the SDS-940, née the
Berkeley Project Genie machine whose creators went on to PARC).
Dartmouth started with BASIC in the early 60’s on GE machines
creating its own generations of online services. There were a number
of smaller online services on their own hardware.
More interesting than all the software or hardware is the flow of
ideas between people and groups – there were relatively few people in
the field and I accidentally crossed a few communities. I really
should write more of this down – even better if someone could put
together a map of the flow of ideas in both academia and commercial
computing.
One example was Jerry Saltzer’s 1966 Runoff which generated IBM
Script (rewritten on CP/CMS) and merged with the IBM automated
document effort yield GML and then SGML and eventually HTML.
Stanford’s Pub took advantage of the XGP (Xerox Graphic Printer).
Impress and the Postscript came out of the West Coast efforts. I’m
omitting the names of the people at this point to avoid the need to
make sure I get them all right and to avoid slighting those I fail to
mention. And I’m also leaving out the many side stories as ideas
branched out and re-met. I’d also want to do more learning – for
example, where did “auto-secretary” on the SDS-940 fit into this mix.
Well, enough nostalgia but I can’t help but wonder what would have
not happened had we today’s concept of “Intellectual Property’ as
something to control rather than share.
-----Original Message-----
From: David Farber [mailto:dave@xxxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Tuesday, July 25, 2006 20:58
To: ip@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [IP] more on snobol & java
Begin forwarded message:
John Shoch <shoch@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
From: John Shoch <shoch@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: July 25, 2006 7:53:48 PM EDT
To: dave@xxxxxxxxxx, ip@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Cc: John Shoch <shoch@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: RE: [IP] snobol & java
Dave,
Now this is a trip down memory lane....
· I first encountered Snobol in a course on “Non-Numerical
Methods” taught at Stanford by Alan Kay and Gio Wiederhold, around
1971. [Is that really 35 years ago?!] It was running in batch mode on
a 360/67.
· I remember I was confused for a little while, until I
figured out that (unlike other langauges) there was no EXPLICIT
operator for concatenating two strings—you just wrote them next to
each other.
· For the take-home exam at the end you could pick one of 3
problems, one of which was a Snobol project. As I recall, I struggled
with it, finally figuring out that it could not be done—to answer the
particular question you needed to observe some internal state of the
pattern-matching system, which was not available. With some
trepidation I went to see Alan: “I’ve worked on this pretty hard, but
I don’t think it can be done....” He looked up and said something
like, “Oh, I haven’t even tried it....” After about 5 minutes of
explanation he agreed, told me I’d done enough work, and said, “What
are you doing this summer? Xerox is opening a research center here in
Palo Alto....” I went for the summer, and stayed 14 years.
Cheers,
John Shoch
Alloy Ventures
-----Original Message-----
From: David Farber [mailto:dave@xxxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Tuesday, July 25, 2006 4:23 PM
To: ip@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [IP] snobol & java
Begin forwarded message:
From: Tim Bond <twwbond@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: July 25, 2006 7:02:09 PM EDT
To: farber@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: snobol & java
Dave,
Was going to send this to IP, and feel free to forward.
I remember “experiencing” a month of Snobol in the fall of 1984 as
part of my CS Intro to programming languages class at RPI . . .
http://www.javaworld.com/javaworld/jw-07-2006/jw-0724-funandgames-
p2.html
· Tim
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