FOCAL

[Larry Rosenman]

On 2016-12-02 22:02, Kevin Oberman wrote:
> On Fri, Dec 2, 2016 at 5:59 PM, Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog at freebsd.org>
> wrote:
> 
>> On Saturday,  3 December 2016 at 11:40:36 +1100, Dave Horsfall wrote:
>> > Be there an implementation of FOCAL?  I have a hankering to get back to
>> my
>> > early programming days :-)
>> 
>> Heh.  I have a paper tape from my first year at uni somewhere in the
>> mess on my desk.  It's been there for at least 10 years, and it's
>> short enough for it to be practical to read it in by eye, but I
>> haven't got more than a third of the way through.  It's in FOCAL-69,
>> and does some world-shattering calculations like mean and standard
>> deviation.  It would be fun to run it again--once.
>> 
>> Greg
>> 
> 
> Wow! Have not thought of FOCAL in years. Used to write a bit both when 
> in
> college and, using FOCAL-11, in my early years at LLNL. Unlike FOCAL on 
> a
> PDP-8, FOCAL-11 ran on top of DOS-11. (No relation to Microsoft DOS.) 
> The
> PDP-8L was the only solid state computer in the lab. All of the others
> still had vacuum tubes and drum memory, though the Univac Athena had 
> both
> drum and core.
> 
> In college I wrote a simple craps game and, it it caught you trying to
> cheat, it zeroed your account and gave you the finger on the ASR-33. My
> computer logic prof (and department head) saw that trivial ASCII art 
> and
> chewed me a new one for putting code to generate that gesture on a 
> school
> computer. That was about 45 years ago. Memories!

Brings back memories for me as well from high school.  Back in 1972.

PDP-8/L in the Levittown (NY) School District.
-- 
Larry Rosenman                     http://www.lerctr.org/~ler
Phone: +1 214-642-9640                 E-Mail: ler at lerctr.org
US Mail: 17716 Limpia Crk, Round Rock, TX 78664-7281