
The Summer Of 1960 (Time Spent with don knuth) - acqq
http://ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/B5000-AlgolRWaychoff.html#7
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jleader
It's great to see this on-line! I have an old xeroxed copy filed away
somewhere, that I got from a co-worker when I worked at the Burroughs Pasadena
Development Center in the mid to late 1980s. In 1991, after the merger with
Sperry into Unisys, the PDC was shut down, and some of us got moved to the
Lakeforest facility. A few of the people mentioned in the narrative were still
at Burroughs in the 1980s. Bobby Creech came back to head the Pasadena
Development Center. Dr. Dave Dahm was a Burroughs Fellow for a while (like
Dijkstra), I think he moved to the Tredyffrin facility.

I also have a sign on my wall that I grabbed from one of the machine rooms
(now we call them data centers) in the Pasadena building before it was
demolished. The sign read "Each person having access to this room is cautioned
not to discuss the machines or work done here with unauthorized employees or
persons outside the company. Premature disclosure of new inventions might void
our patent rights here or throughout the world." It's signed by Ray Macdonald,
company president in the 1960s. I saved it because of the irony that
relatively few people credited Burroughs with many of the ideas that were
brought together in the B5000.

~~~
watmough
One of those people who did credit Burroughs, was Prof Ron Morrison at St
Andrews. His students often heard little snippets about the B5000, sometimes
coincidental with diatribes against Pascal, particularly the arbitrary
limitations like the limited set type.

When I was there in 84-88, undergrads started off in S-Algol which was a
recursive descent compiled, tidied-up Algol that ran on a C-based beta^h^h^h^h
virtual machine. Lovely, friendly little language.

After exposure to 'S', JH and SH classes switched to PS-Algol which had
procedures as first class objects, so we learnt closures, and how to do really
neat things like serialize closures to store (one calll), reflection, generate
and compile code on the fly. Really a great language, and back in 85/86 or so,
it had all this cool, safe stuff that Java didn't get until several iterations
in.

I didn't stay on after I graduated, so I missed out on the next step, which
was a sort of always live environment called Napier. I don't know much about
it, but always imagine a sort of concurrent Algol based Smalltalk. That may be
close or far off the mark.

------
gruseom
I read through this memoir over the last week. I think it's one of the best
things I've ever read. When I finished it I felt sad, like when you're a kid
and you finish a great book and you feel sad because it's over.

It's like an abbreviated Soul of a New Machine. The machine he's writing about
was one of the great achievements in computing, according to Alan Kay.

------
pmcjones
For the listing and internals documentation (by Knuth) for this compiler, see:
[http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/ALGOL/algol58im...](http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/ALGOL/algol58impl/#Burroughs_205)

~~~
acqq
Also see Knuth telling his side of the story

<http://www.webofstories.com/play/17086>

