fortran    algol

The results are not too surprising, since Fortran is still widely used by scientists and engineers. Algol, which, according to The Retrocomputing Museum, is “the common ancestor of C, Pascal, Algol-68, Modula, Ada, and most other conventional languages that aren’t BASIC, FORTRAN, or COBOL,” isn’t used as much anymore.

Should IBM consider a return of OS/2? A systems integrator close to the computing giant swears there’s a move afoot inside IBM to reintroduce the operating system — revered by some, reviled by many –before it faded out more than 10 years ago. He has heard this from inside Big Blue itself.

This will mean nothing to young’uns who do not remember the great OS war waged between IBM and Microsoft after their joint development of OS/2 fell apart. Running on both PCs and servers, OS/2 was object-oriented and CORBA-compliant, could multitask and sported a neat graphical user interface. People liked the OO Workplace Shell GUI very much.

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According to the integrator, IBM’s nascent plan is to repurpose OS/2 “services” atop a Linux core.

The obvious question is why? And the answer is despite Windows’ spanking, IBM shops still run quite a bit of OS/2 — not that they’ve advertised that fact. In theory these companies can drop this Linux-OS/2 amalgam in to replace aging installations with minimal disruption.

I thought Workplace Shell was the best thing about OS/2, otherwise my interest in OS/2 at this point is pretty minimal.

Multics (Multiplexed Information and Computing Service) was a mainframe timesharing operating system that began at MIT as a research project in 1965. It was an important influence on operating system development.

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In order to preserve the ideas and innovations that made Multics so important in the development of computer systems, Bull HN has provided the source code for the final Multics release, MR 12.5 of November 1992 to MIT. It is a generous contribution to computer science knowledge and is provided for academic purposes. Additionally, we intend this site to become a repository for many papers and documents that were created during the Multics development as a complement to the other Multics sites.

Check out: Multics Source and Listings.

Derek’s Virtual Slide Rule Gallery (A gallery of clickable simulated slide rules)

I guess Alan Turing was right — you really can emulate any computer on any other computer.

Having learned a more “modern” Algol (on Burroughs computers in the early/mid 80′s), I think it’s kind of neat to revisit this language, which, according to The Retrocomputing Museum, is “the common ancestor of C, Pascal, Algol-68, Modula, Ada, and most other conventional languages that aren’t BASIC, FORTRAN, or COBOL.”