langreiter.com plain, simple: 2005-03-27-b5k

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2005-03-27-b5k

CREATED BY chris • LAST EDITED BY chris 7210 days AGO

"The first commercial open source platform was probably the Burroughs B5000, designed 40 years ago in 1963 by Robert Barton and a team at [create Burroughs]. These systems were stack machines without an assembler language — all development was done in variants of the ALGOL language [...] C.A.R. Hoare famously noted that ALGOL was a significant improvement on most of its successors."

"These machines were designed by software people with integrated software and hardware, not by hardware people with software produced as an afterthought."

"Another interesting fact is that a bright young student had developed, in a staggering three months during a summer break, the first working ALGOL compiler on Burroughs equipment in the late 1950s. That student was Donald Knuth."

"In 1963, the B5000 operating system (ominously called MCP – Master Control Program) started with 30,000 lines of ALGOL. It is now (since these systems live on in the Unisys [create ClearPath NX] Series) into the millions of lines and still open source."