🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <66...@helios.TAMU.EDU>, mcg...@cs.tamu.edu (Tim McGuire) writes:
> I remember the APL implementation on the 1130.  You essentially had to use
> the 1130 as a "personal computer".  It didn't make one very popular with the
> FORTRAN crowd who were used to batch processing.  Anyone out there who 
> actually used 1130 APL?

Depends on what you meant by ``used''.  Do you remember the keyboard?
ARRGHHH!

That's better, I've calmed down.  Let me explain the keyboard situation.
APL requires a large (and unusual) character set.  The 1130 had a keyboard
stolen from an 029 keypunch.  (In fact, it even provided input in
card code.  But for some reason, they left the multipunch key off
on the 1130...)  The 029 didn't have nearly enough keys, hence the 1130
didn't, either.  So some brilliant soul assigned *3* meanings to each
key, and decreed two keys to be shift.  One shifted up, and the other
shifted sideways.  (The images come from the little decals you were
supposed to glue to the front of each key.)  If you hit a shift key
twice, it locked you in that mode.  Fortunately, the 1130 was reasonably-
well equipped with blinking lights, so the accumulator and extension
registers would indicate the current shift status of the keyboard.

That said, the rest of the APL system was really a waltzing bear sort
of thing.  I'm still amazed they crammed that much code into so little
space, even with the disk I/O they had to do for almost anything.  But
that made things run *very* slowly.  Still, it was better than the
drain-bamaged FORTRAN the machine had.