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From: cortesi@informix.com (David Cortesi)
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers,comp.lang.apl
Subject: Re: APL\360 Computers
Message-ID: <1991Feb8.003825.15723@informix.com>
Date: 8 Feb 91 00:38:25 GMT
References: <1226@stca77.stc.oz>
Sender: cortesi@informix.com
Organization: Informix Software, Inc.
Lines: 22

In article <1226@stca77.stc.oz> peter@stca77.stc.oz (Peter Jeremy) writes:
>The first commercial APL product was APL\360, released by IBM and
>running on the IBM 360 computers.  The back of the APL\360 manual
>describes a number of useful APL functions supplied in a workspace
>with APL\360, including execution times. ...Does anyone know what
>system these examples were run on?  

The product was developed in the IBM Philadelphia Scientific Center.
During that era, if memory serves, that site had a 360/75 as its main
computing resource.  That was a big machine with a fast floating point
unit, soon superceded by the 360/85.  But the manual, or that appendix
of it, might have been prepared elsewhere.  The Palo Alto development
center, where APL\360 the product was maintained and enhanced, had a
360/50 as its main workhorse.

I am a little surprised there is no indication of what machine
produced the timings.  The wide range of price & performance over the
360 line was one of its advantages, and whoever wrote the manual would
have been well aware that different users would see different results
depending on the machine in use.  I seem to remember APL\360 could be
coerced into running (standalone!) on a 360/30, though a 360/40 with
DOS or a /50 with OS/MFT was a more typical host.