Ken Iverson in Denmark

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Ken Iverson in Denmark

from Gitte Christensen (APL90 Chairman)

The Danish APL community is glad to be able<br>to contribute to this memorial for Ken, who has meant so much to us during our<br>lives.

When the sad news of Ken’s passing reached<br>us, a few of us APLers in Denmark started to collect material for an obituary<br>and fortunately some of the APL’ers from the very early days are still around<br>and were able to share their memories.

Per Gjerløv, who is a lifetime APL’er, and<br>who many of you may know, had a lot to contribute. He was present when APL came<br>to Europe in the late sixties, and I would like to share his memories with you.

In July 1967 Hans Helms arranged a summer<br>school with the title Programming Languages. It was a huge success with many<br>prominent participants. Amongst languages presented were Snobol, Lisp and Algol<br>98.

IBM sent a young man called Ken Iverson,<br>from the research labs in Yorktown Heights (in photo with Per Gjerl&oslash;v). Iverson had developed a mathematical<br>notation which was now executable on the system 360. Along with Ken Iverson<br>came Dick Lathwell with a magnetic tape containing the system and the intention<br>was to do a live demonstration on a typewriter terminal 2741. The dialog was to<br>be shown on TV cameras to the audience.

Now that was a tall order – typewriter<br>terminal sessions were not very common then – but Dick Lathwell and a young<br>engineer, Henrik Nyegaard, went to the University of Bergen (500 miles away, in<br>Norway!) where computer time could be rented and installed the tape.

After a while, many members of the audience<br>were starting to suffer from fatigue. Several complicated languages had been<br>talked about and demonstrated before Mr. Iverson appeared. A short way into his<br>presentation Iverson performed a number of keystrokes including keying the<br>number 2 and the plus sign explaining that he would now create the expression 2+2<br>– and magically the number 4 was returned by the machine. Asked about<br>declarations, Iverson explained that the computer was smart enough to figure<br>out that 2 was an integer all by itself. The audience was suddenly wide awake!

Now IBM Sales heard about this system.<br>ØK-data had just announced a timesharing service based on a system from General<br>Electric using the language BASIC. IBM did not have anything in their portfolio<br>to match this until APL arrived, and in November 1967 it was decided to go with<br>APL and after a couple of hectic months IBM was able to offer an APL<br>timesharing system on system 360 model 40. An impressive system capable of<br>supporting 30 users simultaneously with good response.

Hans Helms wanted the system to be shown in<br>November at the yearly SEAS meeting in Scheveningen, Holland – SEAS being the<br>European equivalent of the American SHARE – user group meetings for large IBM<br>customers. Again Henrik Nyegaard was charged with the task of providing a line<br>to the APL system running in Bergen. He managed this for the second time, this<br>time further challenged by the task of getting the connection safely through<br>the manual extension board at the hotel where the conference took place.<br>Unfortunately this bright young man was quickly lost to the APL community; he<br>embarked on a management career and ended up running IBM Denmark.

The demonstration went well and was a great<br>success and many large corporations in Europe started using APL, among them<br>VOLVO who to this day are still using APL for some of their planning<br>applications. The centre in Denmark was the first in Europe but soon many more<br>came too.

Ken Iverson visited Denmark on several<br>occasions in the early days – specially when the municipalities data centre<br>started to offer the service to primary and secondary schools. On one occasion<br>Ken almost lost the attention of the audience after the break. He had filled<br>out the left side of the blackboard before the break writing with his right<br>hand. After the break he continued filling the right side – now writing with<br>his left hand not to obstruct the view of the audience. A heated debate broke<br>out amongst the participants whether he had been right handed before the break<br>or not.

As most of you will know Ken was left<br>handed but was ambidextrous with respect to writing.

In 1980 around the time of what...