Author Archives: Paul McJones

Elements of Programming

Posted on 6/20/2009 by Paul McJones

Elements of Programming, by Alexander Stepanov and Paul McJones, was published this month by Addison-Wesley Professional. From the preface: This book applies the deductive method to programming by affiliating programs with the abstract mathematical theories that enable them to work. … Continue reading →

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Oral history of Robert W. Taylor

Posted on 5/5/2009 by Paul McJones

Robert W. Taylor directed external research at NASA, where he funded early work by Douglas Engelbart, and at the ARPA IPTO, where he initiated the ARPANET project. He also founded the Xerox PARC Computer Science Laboratory and later the DEC … Continue reading →

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Notes from Lisp50

Posted on 10/30/2008 by Paul McJones

The Learning Lisp blog has an interesting series of postings on the recent Lisp50 conference: JonL Recalls How Sussman Revealed the Nature of Intelligence… Model-View-Controller Considered Harmful McCarthy Reaffirms the Importance of Having Access to the Abstract Syntax Fritz Kunze … Continue reading →

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Lisp’s 50th Birthday Celebration

Posted on 7/4/2008 by Paul McJones

A celebration of the 50th anniversary of Lisp is taking place in October at OOPSLA 2008. John McCarthy will give a talk about the early history of Lisp. Also Guy Steele and Richard Gabriel will repeat their 1992 HOPL-II talk … Continue reading →

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VLISP documents; LISP Bulletin #2 and #3

Posted on 2/23/2008 by Paul McJones

Jérôme Chailloux recently told me about the wonderful ArtInfo-MusInfo web site, which contains a variety of documents produced by a group of “painters, musicians, psychologists, pedagogues, linguists, mathematicians, poets, architects and computer scientists gathered within the Computer Science Department of … Continue reading →

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ACM Classic Books Series

Posted on 1/15/2008 by Paul McJones

Last summer, ACM posted PDF versions of some books in its Classic Books Series, which resulted from a poll of ACM members initiated by David Patterson, who was then ACM President. The books are accessible to anyone who creates a … Continue reading →

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The Revised MacLisp Manual goes online

Posted on 12/26/2007 by Paul McJones

MIT’s MacLisp played a key role in Lisp history, but its documentation often lagged the system as developers concentrated on adding features and improving performance. Around the time that Lisp machine development eclipsed PDP-10 MacLisp, this final MacLisp document was … Continue reading →

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BBC Radio observes Fortran’s 50th birthday

Posted on 12/18/2007 by Paul McJones

This week’s episode of BBC Radio’s Digital Planet show includes a short segment on the 50th anniversary of Fortran. The presenter, Gareth Mitchell, interviewed me last week and about 4 minutes of that interview are included. If you’re interested, the … Continue reading →

Posted in FORTRAN, Software history | 1 Comment

Computer History Museum videos coming to YouTube

Posted on 12/12/2007 by Paul McJones

The Computer History Museum has just launched a partnership with YouTube to provide a ComputerHistory “channel”. Right now it has 23 videos from various events and lectures at the museum; if you subscribe (via the orange button), you’ll be notified … Continue reading →

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C++ Historical Sources Archive

Posted on 6/11/2007 by Paul McJones

Observant audience members at Bjarne Stroustrup’s HOPL-III C++ talk this past weekend may have noticed on the last slide a mention of the C++ Historical Sources Archive at the Computer History Museum. This is a project Bjarne and I have … Continue reading →

Posted in General, Repositories, Software history | 2 Comments

Remembering John Backus

Posted on 4/1/2007 by Paul McJones

As an undergraduate at the University of California at Berkeley in the late 1960s, I first learned of John Backus and his work on Fortran, BNF, and Algol. Around 1972 or 1973 I attended a talk John gave on “variable-free … Continue reading →

Posted in FORTRAN, General, Software history | 4 Comments

Upgraded to WordPress 2.1

Posted on 2/16/2007 by Paul McJones

This blog is now running on WordPress 2.1. I’d like to thank the friendly staff at my ISP, meer.net, for moving my account to a new server with PHP 4.1.21. Please let me (paul at mcjones dot org) know if … Continue reading →

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A report and a request from Al Kossow

Posted on 9/29/2006 by Paul McJones

Many people know of Al Kossow through his work on bitsavers.org, which I mentioned in a previous post. I’m very pleased to mention here Al’s recent appointment as the Robert N. Miner Software Curator at the Computer History Museum. Al … Continue reading →

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TENEX Interlisp

Posted on 8/14/2006 by Paul McJones

Tom Rindfleisch kindly supplied a set of TENEX Interlisp files from a system dump of the SUMEX-AIM <lisp> directory as of January 31, 1982. Tom notes: This version of Interlisp should be both TENEX and TOPS20 compatible. It came at … Continue reading →

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Progress with Lisp 1.5 source

Posted on 8/14/2006 by Paul McJones

Rich Cornwell (some of whose work I reported on earlier) and Bob Abeles (who was the first to point out to me the existence of the Fortran II sources) have recently completed a reconstruction of the card deck for the “Bonnie’s Birthday Assembly” … Continue reading →

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IBSYS Fortran II runs on a SIMH-based simulator

Posted on 4/3/2006 by Paul McJones

An upcoming release of Bob Supnik’s SIMH (Computer History Simulation system) will include IBM 704/709/7090/7094 simulation provided by Rich Cornwell. Rich has been very busy lately: implementing and debugging the simulations of the CPU, channels, controllers, and devices; tracking down … Continue reading →

Posted in FORTRAN, LISP, Simulators | 2 Comments

A day in the life of an IBM Customer Engineer, circa 1959

Posted on 3/19/2006 by Paul McJones

I’ve added another important document to the Fortran I/Fortran II collection at the Computer History Museum: Anonymous. FORTRAN I, II, and 709 : Customer Engineering Manual of Instruction. IBM Corporation, Form R23-9518-0, February 1959, 67 pages. Copy belonging to Mark … Continue reading →

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704 FORTRAN II listing available

Posted on 2/1/2006 by Paul McJones

I just posted a scan of the three-volume listing of the IBM 704 FORTRAN II compiler to the History of FORTRAN and FORTRAN II web site at the Computer History Museum. This listing was donated to the Smithsonian National Museum … Continue reading →

Posted in FORTRAN, Operating systems | 2 Comments

ACM grants permission for full text of FORTRAN-related articles

Posted on 1/1/2006 by Paul McJones

I have the pleasure of thanking ACM for granting permission to post the full texts of five ACM-copyrighted articles to the FORTRAN/FORTRAN II web site at the Computer History Museum. Here they are; for those already in the ACM Digital … Continue reading →

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FORTRAN 25th anniversary film online

Posted on 11/19/2005 by Paul McJones

I recently updated this item of the History of FORTRAN web site at the Computer History Museum to include an online copy of the video: FORTRAN 25th anniversary film, 1982, 12.5 minutes. Computer History Museum lot number X2843.2005, donated by … Continue reading →

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