• APL BUG 12 October 2020: Gavin Scott on APL\3000

    From Curtis Jones@21:1/5 to All on Mon Oct 5 11:33:09 2020
    The APL Bay Area Users' Group, the Northern California APL ACM Chapter, will meet on the 12th of October to hear Gavin Scott tell about APL\3000 for the HP 3000 minicomputer.

    Monday, 12 October 2020, 10 a.m. PDT
    Zoom URL to be determined
    Check http://www.sigapl.org/APLBUG.php

    About APL\3000:

    Started as a project at HP Labs in Palo Alto CA at the beginning of the 1970s, APL\3000 was an ambitious implementation that sought to match the functionality of IBM's mainframe APL SV product on a 16-bit minicomputer. It offered a number of firsts,
    such as the first APL compiler (and a byte-code virtual machine to execute the compiled code), a unique 32-bit Virtual Memory system that used custom CPU microcode to offer APL workspaces limited in size only by available disk space, and APLGOL, an APL
    variant language that allowed the use of Structured Programming style flow control rather than APL's pure "goto" style.

    This talk will introduce the classic 1970s HP 3000 along with APL\3000, discuss the development and marketing of APL on the HP 3000, and how it was ultimately unsuccessful in the marketplace, and then talk about the process of resurrecting it 35 years
    later and provide a demonstration running on an emulated HP 3000 circa 1980.

    About Gavin:

    Gavin Scott saw his first HP 3000 minicomputer in 1980 while he was still in high school and then spent the next 40 years or so in a career that mostly revolved around software development for the HP 3000 and its successors. His first exposure to APL
    was on a Xerox Sigma 7 at the University of California at Irvine in the late 1970s. Now retired, his interests include the history of computing and collecting/curating historical computer software using simulated hardware. This summer he worked to
    bring back to life the 1976 APL\3000 system that ran on the HP 3000 in those days, as well as an emulation of the HP 2641A APL Display Station terminal that went with it.

    References:

    "The rise, fall, and resurrection of APL\3000" by Gavin Scott in comp.lang.apl.
    https://groups.google.com/g/comp.lang.apl/c/r3apoNzhxso

    "The HP 2641A APL Display Station" by Gavin Scott in comp.lang.apl. https://groups.google.com/g/comp.lang.apl/c/X57IUOG-9o0

    HP Journal issue devoted to APL\3000: https://www.hpl.hp.com/hpjournal/pdfs/IssuePDFs/1977-07.pdf

    https://aplwiki.com/wiki/APL%5C3000

    from August:
    The APL BUG received word that there are people trying to get APL\3000 up and running on a simulated Classic HP 3000 and were looking for the HP APL\3000 Reference Manual. Thanks to Al Kossow, The Computer History Museum and Bitsavers!
    http://bitsavers.org/pdf/hp/3000/mpeII/32105-90002_APL3000_Reference_Manual_Nov1976.pdf

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  • From Curtis Jones@21:1/5 to All on Sat Oct 10 11:49:19 2020
    Zoom information for APL BUG meeting at 10 a.m. PDT on Monday 12 October 2020:

    https://www.zoom.us/
    Select "Join a meeting" at the top of the screen.
    Meeting ID: 912 6148 9084
    Passcode: (obfuscated) ,/1 0⍕(6⍴10)⊤×/6 125 73
    (Part of the obfuscation is to include a leading zero.)
    or, if Unicode font not in use,
    ,/1 0{format}(6{rho}10){represent}{times}/6 125 73

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  • From Gavin Scott@21:1/5 to All on Sat Oct 17 13:48:55 2020
    As I promised, here are links to various resources I mentioned during the talk:

    The APL Wiki entry for APL\3000:

    https://aplwiki.com/wiki/APL%5C3000

    The APL\3000 Reference Manual at Bitsavers:

    http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/hp/3000/mpeII/32105-90002_APL3000_Reference_Manual_Nov1976.pdf

    The paper Programming for Performance in APL\3000:

    http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/apl/Papers/ProgrammingForPerformance/view

    The paper The Dynamic Incremental Compiler in APL\3000:

    http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/apl/Papers/DYNAMICINCREMENTAL/view

    The July 1977 HP Journal issue devoted to APL\3000 and the HP 2641A APL Display Station terminal:

    https://www.hpl.hp.com/hpjournal/pdfs/IssuePDFs/1977-07.pdf

    And finally here's a link to my turnkey Classic HP 3000 emulation setup if you want to play with APL\3000 yourself or just help preserve this historical collection. It is based on J David Bryan's amazing HP 3000 Series III simulator, with the MPE V/R
    operating system circa 1986, the language subsystems for APL, COBOL (68) COBOL II (74), FORTRAN (66), RPG, BASIC, BASICOMP, PASCAL, and SPL, plus ~15 years of the HP 3000 International Users Group Contributed Software Library tapes, most of the old HP
    2000 Timesharing Basic contributed library converted (sorta) to HP 3000 BASIC/V, and lots of other goodies like many of the most iconic mini and mainframe computer games of the day. It also comes bundled with a minimal MAME setup for the emulated HP
    2641A and HP 2645A terminals which are ready to use. See the included README.txt. Requires Windows.

    https://drive.google.com/file/d/1bmXvHkBLbUeLAid73EJ4H1yQ2uwXQuRu

    And as a bonus, here's a link to the IBM 1401 Datacenter Simulator that I mentioned. You can't run APL on it, but it's a neat example of the things people are doing in the old computer simulation world these days. It simulates not just the IBM 1401 and
    peripherals, but the physical space that contained them. You can walk around in 3D, sit down at the 029 keypunch, punch your deck of cards, pick up the deck, walk over to the card reader and load them in and hit the buttons to read them in and run them
    and have the result printed on the line printer. Has links to YouTube demos as well as the software.

    https://rolffson.de/

    Let me know if I forgot anything!

    Gavin

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