On 16 Jan 2004 20:50:44 GMT, wrote:

In uk.d-i-y, Andy Wade wrote:

Nostalgia: I used to be quite proficient in Algol 60; never could understand
why anyone could prefer Fortran...

Another factor was that a lot of UK universities bought Elliott 803s,
mainly in the 60's IIRC, and then followed by buying 4130s.
University of Wales had one of those, and I believe York and
Manchester did as well.

Algol-60 was the preferred compiler on both of those. On the 803 you
had to load the compiler from paper tape (about 4k of it) and then
your own stuff. On the 4130 you would type up cards on a punch and
give a stack to an operator. At some time later, you would get a
stack of cards back and some listing.

Mentioning York, reminded me, since we were discussing mail the other
day, that there used to be a device invented at York called a 'York
box". IIRC, it was some kind of mail gateway or perhaps protocol
translator. They sold units to most of UK academia. I can't find
any references to it now though...... I think it was early 80s?


I think it was most of all availability of libraries/bits of program others
had already written: an early case of first-to-market wins.

I too have a fondness for Algol 60: the first program I ever wrote, doing
self-teaching on the University (of York, if anyone's interested) timesharing
machine was in Algol-60, a few days after I'd got my account and got
fatally bitten by the computing addiction while nominally doing a biochem
degree (swapped to CompSci after a year). A little automated Q&A system
recommended which language you should learn, and though it had been put
together by Simula fanatics - so Simula was always somewhere on the top 3
of its recommendations - Algol was wot floated to the top, so I hied me off
to the university library, got out a book, and started on the slippery slope.
Deepening the addiction, the 6-line program compiled & ran first time...

Ah, TOPS-10: now *there* was an OS. And a 36-bit machine with ability to
address bytes of arbitrary size (from 1 to 36 bits) and step within and
across words as you incremented along... and perform arbitrary levels of
address redirection (briefly opening up the possibility of an uninterruptible
instruction, JRST @. - causing the machine to fetch the address of the
address of the address of the address of [repeat ad inf] the place to jump to.

Stefek 'has this drifted off topic far enough yet'?

..andy

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