VideoBrain APL/S (Was: APL and descendants - was Re: If C is so evil why

steven at malikoff.com steven at malikoff.com
Sun Apr 16 08:05:44 CDT 2017


Dwight said
> I have a tiny APL that was written for the 8080 someplace.
> It has input that use ASCII keyboard input instead of the
> funny characters.
> I played with it a little on my IMSAI. The fellow had hand
> written and assembled it by hand.
> Not something I'd ever like to do.
> I make to many simple mistakes and I don't have any interest
> in erasure companies.
>
> Dwight

I'm guessing the Videobrain APL/S was a port of EMPL, a tiny APL for the 8080 by
Eric Mueller written in 1977 https://archive.org/details/ddj-1997-04-EMPL-Micro-APL-8080
that fitted in < 6Kb (and thanks to Dwight for disassembling the original code for this,
given his extremely modest comment above.)

Regarding porting 8080 code to the F8, this was mentioned by Jerry Fox in his article 'Tiny
BASIC for the F8' from DDJ Vol 4 #39 October 1979
http://6502.org/documents/publications/dr_dobbs_journal/ where he said "Herewith is
documentation and the source for a tiny BASIC Interpreter written for the F8 microcomputer.
The structure of the program is copied from Palo Alto tiny BASIC written by Dr. Li-Chen
Wang. It is to Dr. Wang’s credit that he wrote such an elegant program that it was fairly
easy to convert to F8 from 8080 assembly language."

Steve.



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