MITILAC(ID:96/mit002)MIT macroassemblerfor MIT Instrumentation Laboratory Automatic Coding MIT macro-assembler for IBM 650, operational July 1955, developed by Richard Battin, Bob O'Keefe, Mary Petrick in used in the Space Guidance research there Places Hardware:
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References: Let me elaborate these points with examples. UNICODE is expected to require about fifteen man-years. Most modern assembly systems must take from six to ten man-years. SCAT expects to absorb twelve people for most of a year. The initial writing of the 704 FORTRAN required about twenty-five man-years. Split among many different machines, IBM's Applied Programming Department has over a hundred and twenty programmers. Sperry Rand probably has more than this, and for utility and automatic coding systems only! Add to these the number of customer programmers also engaged in writing similar systems, and you will see that the total is overwhelming. Perhaps five to six man-years are being expended to write the Alodel 2 FORTRAN for the 704, trimming bugs and getting better documentation for incorporation into the even larger supervisory systems of various installations. If available, more could undoubtedly be expended to bring the original system up to the limit of what we can now conceive. Maintenance is a very sizable portion of the entire effort going into a system. Certainly, all of us have a few skeletons in the closet when it comes to adapting old systems to new machines. Hardly anything more than the flow charts is reusable in writing 709 FORTRAN; changes in the characteristics of instructions, and tricky coding, have done for the rest. This is true of every effort I am familiar with, not just IBM's. What am I leading up to? Simply that the day of diverse development of automatic coding systems is either out or, if not, should be. The list of systems collected here illustrates a vast amount of duplication and incomplete conception. A computer manufacturer should produce both the product and the means to use the product, but this should be done with the full co-operation of responsible users. There is a gratifying trend toward such unification in such organizations as SHARE, USE, GUIDE, DUO, etc. The PACT group was a shining example in its day. Many other coding systems, such as FLAIR, PRINT, FORTRAN, and USE, have been done as the result of partial co-operation. FORTRAN for the 705 seems to me to be an ideally balanced project, the burden being carried equally by IBM and its customers. Finally, let me make a recommendation to all computer installations. There seems to be a reasonably sharp distinction between people who program and use computers as a tool and those who are programmers and live to make things easy for the other people. If you have the latter at your installation, do not waste them on production and do not waste them on a private effort in automatic coding in a day when that type of project is so complex. Offer them in a cooperative venture with your manufacturer (they still remain your employees) and give him the benefit of the practical experience in your problems. You will get your investment back many times over in ease of programming and the guarantee that your problems have been considered. Extract: IT, FORTRANSIT, SAP, SOAP, SOHIO The IT language is also showing up in future plans for many different computers. Case Institute, having just completed an intermediate symbolic assembly to accept IT output, is starting to write an IT processor for UNIVAC. This is expected to be working by late summer of 1958. One of the original programmers at Carnegie Tech spent the last summer at Ramo-Wooldridge to write IT for the 1103A. This project is complete except for input-output and may be expected to be operational by December, 1957. IT is also being done for the IBM 705-1, 2 by Standard Oil of Ohio, with no expected completion date known yet. It is interesting to note that Sohio is also participating in the 705 FORTRAN effort and will undoubtedly serve as the basic source of FORTRAN-to- IT-to-FORTRAN translational information. A graduate student at the University of Michigan is producing SAP output for IT (rather than SOAP) so that IT will run on the 704; this, however, is only for experience; it would be much more profitable to write a pre-processor from IT to FORTRAN (the reverse of FOR TRANSIT) and utilize the power of FORTRAN for free. in "Proceedings of the Fourth Annual Computer Applications Symposium" , Armour Research Foundation, Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, Illinois 1957 view details An automatic programming routine called S.I.R., Symbolic Interpretive Routine, was used to program the problem. It is similar to S.O.A.P., with the addition of floating point arithmetic (automatic scaling) and several additional operations such as SINE, EXP, LOG, etc. The program can handle up to approximately 300 points on the experimental curve at one time. Extract: SOAP The program was first written in symbolic notation in which no definite drum locations or "addresses" were used. This was then assembled and optimized by means of a program known as S.O.A.P., Symbolic Optimal Assembly Program. By means of this program addresses are assigned for the instructions in such a way that a minimum of time is required to perform the program. All data are punched on cards in eight groups or "words" each containing ten digits. The first word on each data card contains the address of the first piece of data on the card along with the total number of pieces of data on the card. This is the usual seven word format used when data are to be read in by means of the seven word loading routine. The Kurie analysis program is essentially a data handling program. Seven tables are stored in the computer. The experimental data are modified and correlated by means of extensive "table lookups," interpolation within the tables, and simple arithmetic calculatians. Extract: MITILIAC The least-squares program was coded in MITILAC, an interpretive routine which simplifies coding for small problems. The data are punched in the standard MITILAC data card format. The program was designed to be able to analyze ane y number of curves without having to read in the MITILAC deck and the instructions each time. in "Proceedings of the Fourth Annual Computer Applications Symposium" , Armour Research Foundation, Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, Illinois 1957 view details in "Proceedings of the Fourth Annual Computer Applications Symposium" , Armour Research Foundation, Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, Illinois 1957 view details Bob Bemer states that this table (which appeared sporadically in CACM) was partly used as a space filler. The last version was enshrined in Sammet (1969) and the attribution there is normally misquoted. in [ACM] CACM 2(05) May 1959 view details in E. M. Crabbe, S. Ramo, and D. E. Wooldridge (eds.) "Handbook of Automation, Computation, and Control," John Wiley & Sons, Inc., New York, 1959. view details in [ACM] CACM 6(03) (Mar 1963) view details Since MAC was not then available on our IBM 650, some of the early analysis of the Atlas guidance system was made using a program, which Bob O'Keefe, Mary Petrick, and I developed, known as the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory Automatic Coding 650 Program or, simply, MITILAC. We modeled the coding format to resemble that used for the CPC. to minimize the transitional shock to those laboratory engineers who, though still uncomfortable with the digital computer, were beginning to wean themselves away from their more familiar analog devices. Extract: Origin of HAL name Since the principal architect of HAL was Jim Miller, who co-authored with Hal Laning a report on the MAC system, it is a reasonable speculation that the space shuttle language is named for Jim?s old mentor, and not, as some have suggested, for the electronic superstar of the Arthur Clarke movie "2001-A Space Odyssey." in [ACM] CACM 6(03) (Mar 1963) view details Resources
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