In a nice article here Jon McGrew takes us on a historical tour from the first APL to the present, stopping off at various historical machines and various impressive capabilities.
A recommended read if you like APL and computer history. Some pictures:
Let me try and quote some highlights:
In the mid-1980s, IBM viewed a supercomputer as being their topend mainframe machines which were also fitted with the IBM Vector Facility which turned their largest mainframe into a supercomputer. The Vector Facility was supported only by Fortran and APL, and that made APL very popular with IBM.
ā¦ one of the really beautiful points about using APL with a Vector Facility is that no oneās code has to change at all ā no tweaks, no changes, and no recompilingā¦ come Monday morning, even old code just runs faster. Fortran couldnāt offer that.
When asking, in the mid-70s, āWhen was APL ābornā?ā, the writer realises the readership internal to IBM is still using an original clean workspace dated 1966:
)LOAD 1 CLEANSPACE SAVED 1966-11-27 17.53.59 (GMT-5)
McGrew discounts several uses of APL: trading, insurance, warehousing, IBMās mainframe configurator, the Space Shuttle landing trajectories as being interesting but not notable:
A deciding point regarding material to be included is: Does this cause you to say, āI didnāt know that APL was involved with that!ā?
According to the piece, illustrated in interesting detail, APL environments were āearly to the gameā in interactivity, user-to-user instant messaging, packet-switching, international PTT connectivity, timesharing, use of public software libraries, election coverage, public demonstration of computers, computer viruses, email, DNA analysis.
To clarify the position
Iāll emphasize again that of course I realize that I was certainly not the first one to create an email system; I donāt claim to be, and I donāt even claim to be the first one to create it in APL code. I applaud Larry Breed and the others who got the APL world on-line with email.
The point of this discussion is that APL was very early to the game with email. In fact, it
was early enough that with the first release of my system I had to explain to people what
āemailā was.
On fancy graphics for TV:
In the 1980s, all of the major U. S. TV networks suddenly came on the air with fancy,
glistening, highly-reflective 3-D floating type and images that fly in from the side with swooshing sounds and so forth.
These days, we are so used to seeing fancy 3-D logos and images that we scarcely notice them anymore, but back in the early 1980s, they were stunning. And they all seemed to arrive at the same time. I remember thinking back then, how is it that all of the television networks have come up with that simultaneously?
All of these logos appeared at about the same time because they were all created by the same person: It was Judson Rosebush, using APL and Fortran. His company was Digital Effects, Inc. He was creating the graphics by actually dialing into the STSC APL system in Bethesda from New York City, and doing it all via dial-up timesharing (at 1200 baud). I was told that one month his timesharing bill hit a quarter of a million dollars, and at that point he reportedly decided that it may be time to get their own mainframe.[
via Liam Proven on mastodon