SPS-II(ID:5498/sps004)

Proto SIMSCRIPT 

for Simulation Programming System

Markowitz, Hausner and Karr, RAND Corporation

Rewrite of SPS-I with improved some improvements - then renamed SIMSCRIPT.
Related languages
SPS-I => SPS-II   Evolution of
SPS-II => SIMSCRIPT   Renaming
References:
  • Markowitz, Harry M. "Efficient Portfolios, Sparse Matrices, and Entities: A Retrospective" Operations Research 50(1) January 2002 view details
  • Markowitz, Harry M. "Oral history interview by Jeffrey R. Yost, 18 March 2002, San Diego, California". OH 333 Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. view details Extract: Anecdote
    Herb Karr called up. Now, I knew Herb from General Electric days. He was sort of a wheeler-dealer, and I don’t mean that as necessarily derogatory, but he was more interested in making money than producing theorems, which is fine. There is an important role in life for people like that. When I was at General Electric, consulting for the Computer Department, he was at General Electric TEMPO [TEchnical Military Planning Operation] in Santa Barbara. I was a consultant to him. He had some other operations research types, RAND types, consulting for him also. It was a fun group. He later moved to Planning Research. I had moved back to RAND. He moved to Planning Research, and he got fired. He was looking for a job. I said, “Would you be willing to write a programming manual?” He said, “Sure, I need a job.” So SPS-I was done, and we were now working on SPS-II, later called SIMSCRIPT. We asked him to write a programming manual for SPS-I. He said, “By the time I finish the programming manual, SPS-II will be ready. Let’s just write a programming manual for SPS-II.”