At the IBM Scientific Centre in Peterlee we had 3270-series terminals for APL characters from 1975, I'm pretty sure. But I learned my APL around 1973 on an EBCDIC-only 3277. No, I didn't use that absurd curly bracketed notation – the first mainframe APL I used was APLSV, which had separate 256-byte input- and output-tables as editable text files. If you had a spare afternoon you could customise them however you liked, and I cobbled-up a usable APL alphabet (small-e for epsilon, small-i for iota, etc) omitting the rarer characters like domino and covering them if needed, or copy/pasting the character from quadAV.
When at last I was able to type real APL characters I didn't take to them at all – I couldn't read the code. But nobody ever read the code. APL was proud of being a Write-Only language. But I felt the shame. There I was, able to read assembly code as fluently as a newspaper, but I couldn't read an APL program I had just written. Fortunately I never had to use one of those blasted golfball terminals which sounded like a tommy gun. They were in heavy use by our project partners ADSS Mohansic for prototyping software (in APL) intended for the hush-hush FS (Future-Series) mainframe. When you walked into their lab, with a hundred APL programmers all beavering away, the noise was deafening. In those days computers were IPL-ed daily (Initial Program Load-ed) – and the FS prototype took longer and longer to IPL as emulation piled on emulation (I think they were using APL to emulate the instruction set!) Eventually it exceeded 24 hours, at which point the project was cancelled, to great staff and customer consternation. So the story goes. Shortly afterward, on one of my regular transatlantic jaunts, I referred airily in conversation to an "Iverson Ball". My interlocutor, a born-again evangelical, curtly informed me it was called the Iverson Printing Element. Ian On Sat, Jun 16, 2018 at 10:26 PM, Don Guinn <[email protected]> wrote: > Other problems. Never heard of a print train with APL characters for high > speed printers. Had to have a special type ball for Selectric typewriters. > It wasn't until the late 1970's that teletype matrix terminals started > supporting APL characters. Likewise for 3270 monitors. > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
