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 free ACM Web Account.
The available books include:
Aho and Ullman: The theory of parsing, [...]
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 published:
Kent M. Pitman. The Revised MacLisp Manual. “Saturday Morning Edition”, M.I.T. Laboratory for Computer Science [...]
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 show will be broadcast at various times December 18 and 19 (today and tomorrow); local schedules [...]
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 been working on in the background for a year or two. Bjarne convinced the appropriate [...]
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 programming” at Berkeley. I was fascinated by programming languages (having worked on implementations of Snobol4, [...]
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 Daniel N. Leeson. Windows Media Video (12.8 megabytes)
(Daniel N. Leeson describes this film in his article [...]
By comparing three versions of the memo (unsigned, but believed written by Irv Ziller) “Proposed Specifications for FORTRAN II for the 704″, dated August 28, September 25, and November 18, 1957, you can watch the design of the subroutine feature of FORTRAN II unfold. The original FORTRAN system (see here or here) had a variety [...]
Work on LISP spread from McCarthy’s original M.I.T. project to other projects at M.I.T. and then to other institutions as people moved on and word about the capabilities of the language spread. John Allen brought a snapshot of the M.I.T.’s PDP-6 LISP to Stanford where it evolved into Stanford LISP 1.6 through the work of [...]
With the permission of The MIT Press, I have posted online copies of two classic LISP books on the History of Lisp website at the Computer History Museum:
John McCarthy, Paul W. Abrahams, Daniel J. Edwards, Timothy P. Hart and Michael I. Levin. LISP 1.5 Programmer’s Manual. The M.I.T. Press, 1962, second edition. PDF
Berkeley and Bobrow, [...]
Based on the progress I’ve made with FORTRAN, I decided to start another effort at the Computer History Museum to track down source code and documents for the original M.I.T. LISP I/1.5 project. I have made some progress, and am assembling a LISP web site at the Museum to organize and present the materials [...]
My efforts to track down source code and documents from the original IBM 704 FORTRAN project have been one of the pilot projects of the Software Collection Committee at the Computer History Museum. I’m starting to assemble a web site at the Museum to organize and present the materials I’ve collected so far. I’d [...]
Bob Bemer, who I communicated with recently regarding the Fortran “Tome”, died of cancer on June 22 at his home on Possum Kingdom Lake in Texas. He was the “father of ASCII” and one of the first to point out the “Y2K” problem (as far back as 1970). Many sources carried the [...]
I learned that Peter Zilahy Ingerman, PhD, was the donor of the Fortran II listing at The Smithsonian. Peter published a number of books and papers in the area of programming languages and compilers.
I called Peter and had a very pleasant conversation. It turned out he’d donated the Fortran materials to The Smithsonian [...]
Tom Van Vleck and I met at Tandem in 1981. Tom is the creator and maintainer of multicians.org, which “presents the story of the Multics operating system for people interested in the system’s history”. Since Tom was at MIT in the 1960s, I thought he might have heard of the “Tome”, so I [...]
Bob Bemer joined IBM in 1949 and has an interesting web site documenting his long career, including leading the development of FORTRANSIT, the second Fortran compiler, for the IBM 650.
Using Google, I came across Bob Bemer’s Who Was Who in IBM’s Programming Research? — Early FORTRAN Days which reproduced an IBM Programming Research [...]
Based on Irv Ziller’s recollection that historic Fortran materials had been sent to the Smithsonian Institution, I looked at their web site and found this page describing the Division of Information Technology & Society, which is part of the National Museum of American History and whose collections include the Computer History Collection. My attempts [...]
The first meeting of the Software Collection Committee of the Computer History Museum was held November 19th. The purpose of the committee is to help the museum, whose mission statement is “To preserve and present for posterity the artifacts and stories of the information age”, bootstrap its software activities. Expected activities include [...]