Rex Swain's APL Information

• APL Organizations
• APL Publications
• APL Vendors
• Free APL Interpreters
• STSC History
• STSC Alumni on the Net
• APL+Win Tools
• Dyalog APL/W Tools and Utilities
• Personal Recollections

• ACM/SIGAPL: http://www.acm.org/sigapl
• British APL Association: http://www.vector.org.uk Home of Vector magazine
• APL Newsgroup: comp.lang.apl
• APL Wiki: http://aplwiki.com

• Vector (British APL Association): http://www.vector.org.uk

• APL2000 (APL+Win): http://www.apl2000.com
• Dyalog Ltd (Dyalog APL): http://www.dyalog.com
• IBM (APL2): https://www.ibm.com/us-en/marketplace/apl2
  The APL2 Programming: Language Reference is arguably the best detailed APL language reference manual

• Dyalog APL is available free for educational and personal, non-commercial use: Dyalog Pricing
  [ You can also try Dyalog APL on the web at http://tryapl.org ]
• NARS2000 by Bob Smith is a free open-source APL interpreter: http://www.nars2000.org

• 1969 - Scientific Time Sharing Corporation incorporated
• 1978 - Initial public offering
• 1979 - Name changed to STSC, Inc.
• 1981 - STSC public offering
• 1982 - Acquired by Continental Telecom Inc.
• 1986 - LBO
• 1992 - Name changed to Manugistics ("Proof that all the good names are taken" -- PC Magazine)
• 1993 - Manugistics Group, Inc. initial public offering
• 1995 - Manugistics sold PC and UNIX versions of APL*PLUS to LEX2000 Financial Reporting Software, which then created a subsidiary named APL2000; products renamed APL+ (to save keystrokes?)
• 1999 - Cognos acquired LEX2000 and APL2000
• 2005 - APLNow LLC purchased the assets of APL2000 Inc. from Cognos. APLNow LLC will do business as "APL2000".

• The STSC Story: It's About Time A promotional film made by Scientific Time Sharing Corporation to promote its APL*PLUS Service, circa 1976

• Scientific Time Sharing Corporation (STSC) Memorabilia re the 1976 installation of an Amdahl 470 mainframe

• Roger Moore has posted an essay on the History of I P Sharp Associates Timesharing and Network which mentions a 1969 arrangement with Scientific Time Sharing Corporation

For many years, I maintained a list of STSC Alumni and their email (no, not 666 BOX) addresses. But the email addresses were often harvested by spammers, so I have reluctantly removed it.

In July of 2008 I created an STSC Alumni group on LinkedIn, which is a sort of Facebook for professional people. Join LinkedIn and then join the STSC Alumni group.

• Free Tools for APL+Win Programmers: A consolidated version of presentations made at the APL2000 Conferences from 2003 through 2006, plus additional tools created since then. See the Tool Talk page for PDF and APL+Win user command file. Last updated 5/10/2023.

• APL2 Emulation Utilities: apl2.dws
  Contains the AXIS and NWISE operators (March 1996)
• "Migration From APL2 to APL/W":
  vector.doc in Word 6.0 format; requires vector.ttf font
  vector2.doc in Word 2003 format with embedded fonts
  Appeared in Vector magazine, vol. 12 no. 4 (April 1996)
• VectorAPL font: vector.ttf
  TrueType font used in VECTOR.DOC

• Here is a blurb I wrote for the 50th anniversary of APL, circa 2016:

  I entered Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York in the fall of 1970. For the hell of it, I signed up for an "Introduction to FORTRAN" course in the school's fledgling Computer Science program. They had an IBM System/360 mainframe which was used by the administration during business hours, and in the early evening we students used punched cards and reams of 11x17 inch paper to do trivial things.

  While waiting around for the system operator to deliver my job output (maybe 16 pages, pointing out a simple syntax error), I wandered down the hall and discovered a room with a few IBM 2741 terminals, which were based on the Selectric typewriter with its unique "golf ball" type element. Somebody was using one of them, and it was chattering away at the impossibly fast speed of 15 characters per second. The guy would type something and hit Return, and the machine would respond – immediately! It was love at first sight.

  It turned out that these wonderful machines were connected by telephone to a mainframe running APL\360. This APL language used weird symbols, but I didn't care! I loved the interactive part of it. So I learned APL (largely from an online tutorial), taught an Intermediate APL course, and used APL for my senior thesis work in Economics.

  Then I was told that there was a small company named Scientific Time Sharing Corporation that sold APL services and might want to hire me. I wanted to be a programmer but they made me be a marketing person – okay, but I still focused on programming. From 1974 to 1982, STSC grew from 30 to 300 employees, and sales of its APL*PLUS products and services peaked at over $30 million/year. It was a great period and the company had many amazingly clever and entertaining people.

  Since then I have been self-employed, working on mainframes and personal computers with APL*PLUS, VS APL, APL2, and Dyalog APL. But I still have a soft spot for those old 2741 terminals. One detail I remember was that if your calculation was taking a long time, the system would twitch the typeball periodically to let you know it was still alive.

• An APL typeball:

  

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  You are visitor since 4 May 1996

  Copyright © 1996-2010 Rex Swain
  E-mail rex@rexswain.com, Web www.rexswain.com