
Episode 185 - Is EMUL-8ion a Form of Flattery?
EMUL-8 is a fascinating programming language. It's described in just one paper from 1977. It's a mix of features from APL, LISP, ALGOL, and...
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EMUL-8 is a fascinating programming language. It's described in just one paper from 1977. It's a mix of features from APL, LISP, ALGOL, and...

I mean that both in the specific and the abstract. This episode we are looking at APL, which stands for A Programming Language. APL was deve...

Dale Biagio(author of Hello, World!) got in touch with me recently. He said he had a book full of short histories of programming languages....

I've been browsing old compur surveys and trying to build up a comprehensive data set. What I've found is a little surprising: between late...

What connects IBM, the NSA, the Third Reich, and high fidelity recordings of symphonies? The answer is: magnetic drum memory. Join me as I l...

In 1947 Raytheon signed a contract to make their first computer. It would be their last... at least for many many years. The fruits of this...

The image of a mainframe is almost always accompanied by it's companion: the magnetic tape drive. For decades magnetic tape served as the me...

In which we discuss GPSS: the General Purpose Simulation Language. As for as languages go, this is a unique one. It's designed for certain t...

The Olivetti Programma 101 isn't quite like any other machine. On first glance it looks like a big desktop calculator. Inside, it's a purebr...

Dan Temkin has been a long time friend of the show. I finally got the chance to sit down and talk with him about one of his latest projects....

Who wants to hear me make incorrect assumptions about old software? RSX is a system that, from the outside, can sound like it has a similar...

UNIX is beloved by many. It's the classic minicomputer operating system. It's big, it's powerful, it's multitasking, and it has some very sp...

Today we are talking about one of the most unique languages I've ever come across. SNOBOL emerges from the early days of programming. It's f...

We are getting back to the actual digital family tree. In 1937 George Stibitz built a tiny binary adding circuit on his kitchen table using...

Hybrid computers are composed of a digital computer linked to an analog computer. That leads to an interesting challenge: how do you write s...

In 1945 the first electronic digital computers sparked to life. Number crunching was instantly changed forever! The perfect technology had a...

Last episode I said that Fourth Generation Languages were a topic for another time. Well... this counts as another time. Today we are trying...

I'm back to normal episodes, and I'm running out the gate with a weird one. Thoroughbred/OS was a multi-user and multi-tasking operating sys...

I recently had the chance to talk to Ben Zotto about his upcoming book: Go Computer Now! - The Story of Sphere Computers. It's all about an...

In 1981 Joe Dellinger attempted to create the perfect computer program: a virus that spread silently. In 1982 a revision of that virus broke...