HOPL C Transcript. Thank you.
Before I begin the talk, I will put forth a little idea I thought of in the last day or so. It's a programming problem having to do with Graph Theory: you have a graph. The nodes contain a record with a language and a person, and, just to make the example concrete: the nodes might be (C, Ritchie), (ADA, Ichbiah), (Pascal, Wirth), or Brinch-Hansen perhaps. (Lisp, Steele), (C++, Stroustrup) might also be part of the population. There is an edge from X to Y, whenever X.Person will throw a barb in public at Y.Language. [Slide 1] The paper itself tells the history of C, so I don't want to do it again. [Slide 2] Here are the five languages: Bliss, Pascal, Algol 68, BCPL, C. [Slide 3] In the first place, the things that they're manipulating, their atomic types, their ground-level objects, are essentially identical. Mostly they were designed (speaking broadly) for `systems programming.' Let me very briefly characterize each language.
Bliss was innovative in a variety of ways. A brief(ish) description of BCPL. Everyone and their pet cats know about C, but relatively few people realize that C was indirectly derived from a language called BCPL, which stands for "Basic CPL"; CPL in turn stands for "Combined Programming Language".
I first encountered BCPL when I was at Cambridge University, the home of the language and its designer, Martin Richards. BCPL was the systems programming language of choice at Cambridge, because it generated code better than the IBM Fortran compilers while not requiring the agony of Assembler. In turn, Computer Science students were taught it as their first "serious" language (interestingly enough, not by Martin Richards).
For many (myself not included) it was their first introduction to anything more advanced than Fortran 66. After graduation, I went to work for a local manufacturer of Z80-based systems that did almost all of its systems programming in BCPL. BCPL implementations are available from Martin Richards, or from the old BCPL distribution. Types Identifiers ? Algol 68 Genie - An Algol 68 Interpreter. Computing History at Bell Labs. In 1997, on his retirement from Bell Labs, Doug McIlroy gave a fascinating talk about the “History of Computing at Bell Labs.”
That page contains audio for the talk in Real Audio format (it was 1997). Almost ten years ago I transcribed the audio but never did anything with it. The transcript is below. My favorite parts of the talk are the description of the bi-quinary decimal relay calculator and the description of a team that spent over a year tracking down a race condition bug in a missile detector (reliability was king: today you'd just stamp “cannot reproduce” and send the report back). But the whole thing contains many fantastic stories. For more information, Bernard D.
Corrections added August 19, 2009. Transcript of “History of Computing at Bell Labs:” Computing at Bell Labs is certainly an outgrowth of the mathematics department, which grew from that first hiring in 1897, G A Campbell. 1:10 Of course, most of the mathematics at that time was continuous. Doug: Was that Harmon?