The Summer Of 1960 (Time Spent with don knuth) | Hacker News Reader

The Summer Of 1960 (Time Spent with don knuth)

ed-thelen.org

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It's great to see this on-line! I have an old xeroxed copy filed away somewhere, that I got from a co-worker when I worked at the Burroughs Pasadena Development Center in the mid to late 1980s. In 1991, after the merger with Sperry into Unisys, the PDC was shut down, and some of us got moved to the Lakeforest facility. A few of the people mentioned in the narrative were still at Burroughs in the 1980s. Bobby Creech came back to head the Pasadena Development Center. Dr. Dave Dahm was a Burroughs Fellow for a while (like Dijkstra), I think he moved to the Tredyffrin facility.

I also have a sign on my wall that I grabbed from one of the machine rooms (now we call them data centers) in the Pasadena building before it was demolished. The sign read "Each person having access to this room is cautioned not to discuss the machines or work done here with unauthorized employees or persons outside the company. Premature disclosure of new inventions might void our patent rights here or throughout the world." It's signed by Ray Macdonald, company president in the 1960s. I saved it because of the irony that relatively few people credited Burroughs with many of the ideas that were brought together in the B5000.

Did the Burroughs you worked at resemble the one Waychoff describes, culturally and intellectually?

I imagine Barton was long gone by the time you got there. Did you hear anything interesting about him? How was his influence regarded?

One of those people who did credit Burroughs, was Prof Ron Morrison at St Andrews. His students often heard little snippets about the B5000, sometimes coincidental with diatribes against Pascal, particularly the arbitrary limitations like the limited set type.

When I was there in 84-88, undergrads started off in S-Algol which was a recursive descent compiled, tidied-up Algol that ran on a C-based beta^h^h^h^h virtual machine. Lovely, friendly little language.

After exposure to 'S', JH and SH classes switched to PS-Algol which had procedures as first class objects, so we learnt closures, and how to do really neat things like serialize closures to store (one calll), reflection, generate and compile code on the fly. Really a great language, and back in 85/86 or so, it had all this cool, safe stuff that Java didn't get until several iterations in.

I didn't stay on after I graduated, so I missed out on the next step, which was a sort of always live environment called Napier. I don't know much about it, but always imagine a sort of concurrent Algol based Smalltalk. That may be close or far off the mark.

I read through this memoir over the last week. I think it's one of the best things I've ever read. When I finished it I felt sad, like when you're a kid and you finish a great book and you feel sad because it's over.

It's like an abbreviated Soul of a New Machine. The machine he's writing about was one of the great achievements in computing, according to Alan Kay.

For the listing and internals documentation (by Knuth) for this compiler, see: http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/ALGOL/algol58im...

Also see Knuth telling his side of the story

http://www.webofstories.com/play/17086

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