Folks There was another Basic Language Machine, UK 1960's, nothing to do with the eponymous language and goo's AI seems able to halucinate it and microcode in responses.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Iliffe_(computer_designer)#The_Basic_Language_Machine The BLM was a precursor to the ICL 2900 and subsequent series of machines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICL_2900_Series Most interestingly the BLM/ICL 2900 was architected to work with Algol68 / S3, just as the Boroughs 6500/7500 was designed for Algol 60. And, most interestingly they are architecturally very similar : objective, techniques, etc. See eg Siewiorek, Bell, Newell; "Computer Structures : Principles and Examples; McGraw Hill; 1982; ISBN 0-07-057302-6; Part 2 Section 2 pp227ff Perhaps a demonstration of the perils of overloaded words, especially in the age of AI Martin -----Original Message----- From: Paul Koning via cctalk [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: 04 May 2025 19:18 Good point. And yet another is ALGOL 60 -- the Burroughs mainframes are stack machines nicely matched to what ALGOL needs, and Burroughs created several special-purpose languages based on ALGOL for that machine. The OS uses one (ESPOL); there is one for the communications machinery (DC-ALGOL) and it has a compiled ALGOL variant called WFL (work flow language) for the batch job control. (As an analogy, imagine if "bash" were a compiler rather than an interpreter.) paul
