Happenings

The Happenings department reports on past, present, and future events of interest to the history of computing. These events include conferences, appropriate sessions from meetings, exhibits, projects, awards, publications, collections, general memorabilia, and important dates in the history of computing. Contributions to the department are encouraged and should consist of a description or report of the event, highlighting its specific relevance. The Retrocomputing Museum is dedicated to programs that induce sensations that hover somewhere between nostalgia and nausea. Our exhibits include many languages, some machine emulators, and a few games. Most are living history-environments that were once important but are now merely antiques. A few never previously existed except as thought experiments or jokes. Most, we hope, convey the hacker spirit-and if not that, then a hint of what life was like back when programmers were real men. The museum site is locke.ccil.org:pub/retro. The curators of the museum are Eric See Eric's offer in the file Charter for more about the kinds of things we build and collect. If you've visited before, check out the " what's new " and " coming soon " sections. You too can contribute to the museum! If you think something belongs here, tell us about it. Take a look at our want list of things we're looking for. Finally, you can look at a list of related resources. Languages. All these packages include documentation and example programs. algol-60-An interpreter for Algol-60, the common ancestor of C, Pascal, Algol-68, Modula, and most other conventional languages that aren't Basic, Fortran, or Cobol. Correctly described by Edsger Dijkstra (one of its co-designers) as " a great improvement on many of its successors. " This distribution includes TeX source for the Algol-60 Report. cfoogol-A compiler for a very, very tiny subset of Algol (no procedures, even). More a demonstration on how to write a recursive descent parser than anything else. Generates stupid but portable C code. Tim Brengle, 1987. An adventure language, semi-object-oriented with LISP-like syntax. A superset of the infamous DDL (Dungeon Definition Language). Available for Unix, MS-DOS, Amiga, and Acorn. (Note: we don't yet carry this locally-we don't know the state of its documentation, or whether it includes examples.) ADVSYS-ADVenture SYStem, another adventure-writing system by David Betz, 1986. The language describes it as " LISP-like and object-oriented.'' We carry it mainly for comparison with ADL. focal-A very archaic educational language, a sibling of (and closely resembling) …