[TUHS] Aleph Null in Software Practice & Experience.

[Ralph Corderoy]

Hi,

Alan Glasser wrote:
> > Darwin, the original game of predation and self-reproduction among
> > programs.
...
> And who doesn't remember SP&E Aleph Null articles?

Doug has made the letter from him, Bob Morris, and Vic Vyssotsky to
Software Practice & Experience which introduces Darwin available at
https://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~doug/darwin.pdf.  The letter is addressed
to C. A. Lang but accompanied by a note that Lang isn't א₀.

http://bit-player.org/2013/who-was-aleph-null wonders if א₀ and
side-kick Archimedes ‘might have been members of the Bell Labs gang that
was so lively and prolific in the late 60s and early 70s’ before
acknowledging the Darwin article rules it out.  After a false start
suspecting Lang, foiled by Doug's PDF of the letter, it goes on to
finally identify א₀ as Brit Richard Parkins who explains how it came
about on his own page at http://www.zen224037.zen.co.uk/SPE.shtml.

Reading the front page of Parkins' site, http://www.zen224037.zen.co.uk,
I see he ‘learnt his craft’ by programming assembler when at Cambridge,
on the country's first PDP-7 which he was allowed to use by Lang and
Neil Wiseman.  Unusually, it had a separate graphics processor driving a
1024²-pixel monochrome display.

Soon after, Parkins went on to build a graphics card for the Data
General Nova which drove a flat screen storage tube before Tektronix
released the 4010.  The story is buried in
http://www.zen224037.zen.co.uk/History.shtml.

-- 
Cheers, Ralph.