[cctalk] Re: Wang TTL BASIC

Folks There was another Basic Language Machine, UK 1960's, nothing to do with the eponymous language and goo's AI seems able to halucinate it and microcode in responses. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Iliffe_(computer_designer)#The_Basic_Lan… The BLM was a precursor to the ICL 2900 and subsequent series of machines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICL_2900_Series Most interestingly the BLM/ICL 2900 was architected to work with Algol68 / S3, just as the Boroughs 6500/7500 was designed for Algol 60. And, most interestingly they are architecturally very similar : objective, techniques, etc. See eg Siewiorek, Bell, Newell; "Computer Structures : Principles and Examples; McGraw Hill; 1982; ISBN 0-07-057302-6; Part 2 Section 2 pp227ff Perhaps a demonstration of the perils of overloaded words, especially in the age of AI Martin -----Original Message----- From: Paul Koning via cctalk [mailto:cctalk@classiccmp.org] Sent: 04 May 2025 19:18 Good point. And yet another is ALGOL 60 -- the Burroughs mainframes are stack machines nicely matched to what ALGOL needs, and Burroughs created several special-purpose languages based on ALGOL for that machine. The OS uses one (ESPOL); there is one for the communications machinery (DC-ALGOL) and it has a compiled ALGOL variant called WFL (work flow language) for the batch job control. (As an analogy, imagine if "bash" were a compiler rather than an interpreter.) paul