GLAGOL 61 explained

Here's another annotated alt.religion.kibology post.

I have just realized that all of the articles that are so obscure that I feel compelled to annotate them heavily are from the same general period: the spring of 1997, when I was finishing my thesis. e. e. "doc" cummings is from April, and Into the Sepia Zone is from March. I'm not sure whether this says something about the culture of academia, or about what my brain does when it wants to escape my head.

The notes are considerably longer than the post. I recommend reading it straight through the first time before you let the pedantry flow over you like a dry, musty breeze.

Never fear, Sammie. I am, as always, compelled to explain the joke for those lacking your encyclopedic knowledge of computer science.

GLAGOL 61 was the forerunner of several undeservedly obscure computer languages, such as Barfy, SNET, and %++. Inspired by an incident (recorded in a humorous note in the Journal of the ACM by Dr. Harry Buttle) in which a moth was squashed by the print head of a primitive Sperry "wrecking-ball" teletype, Buttle invented the insect-oriented programming paradigm and created a language for the representation of algebraic and algorithmic formulae whose symbols consisted exclusively of

vowels, used as reserved key-letters, and
bugs squashed on the page.

GLAGOL (short for GeneraL AlGOrithmic Language) used a specially designed terminal whose printing element was a modified flyswatter. Used in a bug-filled room (the prototype was set up in a dormitory shower room at William and Mary that had a broken window), it required the use of rubber type to set vowels. Later, the rubber-type mechanism was abandoned in favor of a carriage-mounted Dymo labelmaker. GLAGOL 61 also required special processing hardware for optimized execution. Source code was represented internally by larval grubs, and executable code by pupae, nestled in a unique "honeycomb store" on a rotating surface of uniform negative Gaussian curvature, which doubled as an element in the machine's analog differential analyzer, and as an occasional dressmaker's dummy, eventually leading to a grotesque incident which I shall not offend the reader's sensibilities by recounting.

GLAGOL 61's economy of expression may be glimpsed in the following two-line decimation algorithm for a fast Fourier transform [I have translated the insect splotches to ASCII as best I can]:

&&@@.;@@#:##&**#&##&#e  &#.@@&*#&aiu  oo&*&&::&#@@@
e &&#;::#;;..,**#@@@#&& oioo u &&#&#@## u @@@@@.@@

Rarely has the essence of an algorithm shone through so clearly on the printed page; of modern languages, only APL is comparable.

Notes

Glagolitic

A medieval Slavic alphabet that looked nothing like the Cyrillic one adopted a bit later. Many of the letters looked a little like bugs squashed on the page. Back

GLAGOL 61

ALGOL was a very influential early computer language (it was one of the ancestors of today's "structured" languages like Pascal, Modula-2, Ada, C, and C descendants like C++ and Java). Old computer languages often had year-digits in their names just like Microsoft operating systems did later. Back

Barfy

Dog of "The Family Circus." Back

SNET

Southern New England Telephone, formerly Connecticut and Rhode Island's local phone company. Kibo occasionally uses "snet" as a nonsense word. Back

%++

Play on C++. I suppose I could call it a play on C# and look prescient. Back

ACM

Association for Computing Machinery. Communications of the ACM is a major journal in computer science. Back

Harry Buttle

At the beginning of the movie Brazil, a fly gets squashed in a teletype and changes a name in the printout from "Harry Tuttle" to "Harry Buttle," precipitating the entire plot. Back

moth

One of the most frequently told stories about the early history of computers is that the word "bug" originates from an incident in which a moth got into a CPU. While the bug's demise was indeed related first-hand in an article by Grace Hopper (inventor of COBOL), the usage pre-dates the incident. Back

Sperry

Old computer equipment manufacturer. I think they got absorbed into Unisys after a series of transmogrifications. Back

"wrecking-ball" teletype

Vaguely inspired by the IBM Selectric typewriter, which typed by smacking a metal ball into the ribbon. Back

insect-oriented programming paradigm

"Object-oriented" is a major software engineering buzzword of the 1980s and '90s. C++ and Java are object-oriented languages. Back

William and Mary

The dormitory I lived in my first year at William and Mary, in lovely, miasmal Williamsburg, Virginia, had a missing window screen in the bathroom, and also lacked air conditioning. When we opened the windows, every surface would become a dance floor for about 100,000,000,000 insects, many of them large. Back

rubber type

Some toy printing presses of past decades used moveable type that came in tiny slivers of rubber-stamp material. I had one of these that I had inherited from older relatives, but I never successfully used it. It was incredibly hard to cram the type into the big roller that did the printing, since the elastic type was likely to twist sideways when it was halfway in, or just spring out and fly across the room. Back

Dymo labelmaker

If you don't know what this is, ask your mom. Back

honeycomb store

This is a surrealistic elaboration of various types of primitive computer memory that used a rotating drum. The use of a magnetic drum (like a hard disk, only cylindrical) as a sort of RAM expansion was pretty common for a while, but I was thinking more of the Atanasoff-Berry Computer, a very early computer that used a rotating drum covered with capacitors to store bits. I might have also been inspired partly by a picture in the Boston Museum of Science, of a giant IBM data storage device from the 1970s that consisted of a hexagonal array of cells containing magnetic tapes that were retrieved by a robot arm. Back

Gaussian curvature

A sphere has positive Gaussian curvature; a saddle, or the middle of an hourglass, has negative Gaussian curvature. Back

differential analyzer

As late as the 1950s (and probably later), people were using analog mechanical computing devices that did calculus by means of wheels and cams. One of the most famous of these was the differential analyzer of Vannevar Bush, who was also a major organizer of the atom bomb project and Cold War-era US science policy, and the originator of some of the earliest concepts of a hypermedia database something like the World Wide Web. Back

fast Fourier transform

A Fourier transform is an operation very commonly performed in signal and image processing (among other things), which, roughly speaking, breaks a signal down into a spectrum of waveforms. There is a fast algorithm for it (FFT for short), which uses a sort of divide-and-conquer process called "decimation." The SETI@home screensaver spends most of its time doing fast Fourier transforms. In college I once did a project that involved writing an FFT, and I looked it up in the campus library, hoping to find a Pascal-like "pseudo-code" listing to work from. Instead, the best book I could find had only lengthy, somewhat obscure verbal descriptions, and a two-line listing in APL. The listing looked a lot like the one in my post. Back

APL

Short for "A Programming Language." Super-intelligent aliens would program their computers in APL. It is notorious for terseness and unreadability. APL is optimized for mathematical expressive power: every operator means about a zillion things depending on context, and algorithms that would take pages in most languages can be compressed into a single line or two of impenetrable APL gibberish. APL uses a special symbol set, so in the days before computers all came with graphics capabilities, you needed special hardware just to see the code on your screen and print it out. Back