more on snobol & java

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: Bob Frankston <Bob2-19-0501 () bobf frankston com>
Date: July 25, 2006 11:57:31 PM EDT
To: "'John Shoch'" <shoch () alloyventures com>
Cc: Dave Farber <dave () farber net>
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 () farber net]
Sent: Tuesday, July 25, 2006 20:58
To: ip () v2 listbox com
Subject: [IP] more on snobol & java







Begin forwarded message:

John Shoch <shoch () alloyventures com>

From:   John Shoch <shoch () alloyventures com>

Date:    July 25, 2006 7:53:48 PM EDT

To:       dave () farber net, ip () v2 listbox com

Cc:       John Shoch <shoch () alloyventures com>

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 () farber net]

Sent:    Tuesday, July 25, 2006 4:23 PM

To:       ip () v2 listbox com

Subject:            [IP] snobol & java









Begin forwarded message:

From:   Tim Bond <twwbond () gmail com>

Date:    July 25, 2006 7:02:09 PM EDT

To:       farber () cis upenn edu

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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