On Sat, Jul 13, 2024 at 1:35 PM John R Levine <johnl(a)taugh.com> wrote:
On Sat, 13 Jul 2024, Dan Cross wrote:
Honeywell was doing it with their
"Liberator" software on the
Honeywell 200 computer in, at least, 1966:
https://bitsavers.org/pdf/honeywell/series200/charlie_gibbs/012_Series_200_…
(See the section on, "Conversion Compatibility."). Given that that
document was published in February of 1966, it stands to reason work
started on that earlier, in at least 1965 if not before ...
Good thought. Now that you mention it, I recall that there were a lot of
Autocoder to X translators, where X was anything from another machine
to Cobol. Of course I can't find any of them now but they must have been
around the same time.
R's,
John
PS: For you young folks, Autocoder was the IBM 1401 assembler. There were
other Autocoders but that was by far the most popular because the 1401 was
the most popular computer of the late 1950s.
Oops, it appears that I inadvertently forgot to Cc: COFF in my earlier
reply to John. Mea culpa.
For context, here's my complete earlier message; the TL;DR is that
Honeywell was doing binary translation from the 1401 to the H-200
sometime in 1965 or earlier; possibly as early as 1963, according to
some sources.
-->BEGIN<--
Honeywell was doing it with their "Liberator" software on the
Honeywell 200 computer in, at least, 1966:
https://bitsavers.org/pdf/honeywell/series200/charlie_gibbs/012_Series_200_…
(See the section on, "Conversion Compatibility."). Given that that
document was published in February of 1966, it stands to reason work
started on that earlier, in at least 1965 if not before (how much
earlier is unclear). According to Wikipedia, that machine was
introduced in late 1963; it's unclear whether the Liberator software
was released at the same time, however. Ease of translation of IBM
1401 instructions appears to have been a design goal. At least some
sources suggest that Liberator shipped with the H-200 in 1963
(
https://ibm-1401.info/1401-Competition.html#UsingLib)
It seemed like what Doug was describing earlier was still
source->binary translation, using some clever macro packages.
-->END<--
- Dan C.