APL\360 source code released to the public

[Christian Langreiter]

After a 10-year odyssey, Len Shustek of the Computer History Museum in
Mountain View, California, secured permission by IBM to release the APL
\360 source code to the public (for non-commercial use) -- right on
time to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the publication of Ken
Iverson's "A Programming Language":

http://www.computerhistory.org/atchm/the-apl-progamming-language-source-code/

The code release is accompanied by a fantastic "online exhibit", which
I'm sure many readers of this newsgroup will find interesting as well.

[Juergen Winkelmann]

It's really exciting that Len managed to obtain IBM's consent to make
the APL\360 source available to the general public back in October 2012.
Reading that source is utterly impressive for anyone having System/360
Assembler knowledge.

Studying the source and the programming techniques used back in the
'60s, however, is one side of the medal only. There presumably are quite
some people around having used APL\360 back in the days, who might be
interested in seeing that historic gem back alive, signing on and having
the old times revive.

The "MVT for APL" system, downloadable from

http://wotho.ethz.ch/mvt4apl-2.00.zip

allows just that: In a few easy steps the system can be installed on a
Windows or Linux system to automatically build APL\360 from source and
bring it up. Just follow the step by step instructions in the
"Installation and Use of APL\360 section" of the User's Manual to bring
up your very own APL\360 system.

Have fun!

Cheers, Juergen

[mkr]

this is the coolest!

thanks,
mike

[Mark F]

On Mon, 22 Apr 2013 13:23:30 -0700 (PDT), mkr <mkr...@gmail.com>
wrote:

> this is the coolest!
>
> thanks,
> mike
>

I noticed that the ZIPed APL source code was 569K, compared to
MVT's ZIP which was 47057MB. So the OS is more than 80 times larger.

The OS probably only has an assembler, a linker, and a
few utilities, a scheduler, a memory manager, plus all of
the device drivers with error recovery. I'd heard that
the error recovery routines were most of the operating
system code. Can anyone verify this?

[Juergen Winkelmann]

On 04/23/2013 06:56 PM, Mark F wrote:
>
> I noticed that the ZIPed APL source code was 569K, compared to
> MVT's ZIP which was 47057MB. So the OS is more than 80 times larger.
>
> The OS probably only has an assembler, a linker, and a
> few utilities, a scheduler, a memory manager, plus all of
> the device drivers with error recovery. I'd heard that
> the error recovery routines were most of the operating
> system code. Can anyone verify this?
>

Hi Mark,

interesting question. But I don't think that comparing the numbers at
that flight level gives much insight. One should dive at least one level
deeper into the directory tree of MVT for APL to find:

find . -maxdepth 1 -type d -exec du -ks {} \; | sort -n
4 ./log
4 ./pch
4 ./prt
8 ./HyperTerminal Configuration
12 ./conf
20 ./aplopr
48 ./scripts
68 ./aplinst
404 ./Fonts
592 ./commadpt-apl360
640 ./tapes
728 ./doc
3008 ./source
3588 ./software
17016 ./PuTTY-0.62_for_Hercules
25456 ./dasd
27552 ./hercules
79196 .


All above values are in uncompressed Kbytes. To name the largest:

- tapes is the public workspace library
- doc is the User's Manual
- source is the APL\360 source code
- software are Hercules and OS/360-MVT Add Ons
- PuTTY-... is a complete redistribution of the PuTTY telnet client
- dasd is the ready to run MVT operating system
- Hercules is the IBM s/3x0 Emulator for 32/64 bit Linux and Windows
- The last line is the total

The binaries resulting from compiling the APL\360 source code are 148
KBytes in size, the operating system's kernel size is 132 KBytes.

I hope, this provides a bit insight on the amount of code involved.

Cheers, Juergen

[Juergen Winkelmann]

On 04/19/2013 02:52 PM, Juergen Winkelmann wrote:
> .
> .

> .
> The "MVT for APL" system, downloadable from
>
> http://wotho.ethz.ch/mvt4apl-2.00.zip
>

> .
> .
> .
Hi All

I've uploaded an extended APL\360 configuration for use with MVT for APL
version 2.00, see

http://wotho.ethz.ch/largeapl.zip

While still being fully authentic this configuration gets a bit closer
to the limits of APL\360 than the one that comes with MVT for APL
version 2.00 originally.

The original configuration creates a small size APL\360 system:

- The workspace size is 36000 bytes (which is the APL\360 default).
- A maximum of 16 terminal sessions can connect and sign on concurrently.
- A maximum of 4 sessions are held in main storage concurrently.

The largeapl.zip archive extends this configuration significantly:

- The workspace size is 432000 bytes (which is the maximum APL\360
supports).
- A maximum of 56 terminal sessions can connect and sign on concurrently.
- A maximum of 10 sessions are held in main storage concurrently.

See file README_largeapl.txt inside the zip archive for installation.

Have fun!

Cheers, Juergen