Dang, brings back amazing memories of seeing the Unix source listings on my office mate’s desk in the Aiken computer lab. I think Harvard got the first officia

Dang, brings back amazing memories of seeing the Unix source listings on my office mate’s desk in the Aiken computer lab. I think Harvard got the first official copy outside of Bell Labs in about 1973 or 4. Memory vague. It was first used on an 11/45 to run the Intro to Programming course for the hoi polloi, running an interpreter for the PPL language, a local higher level language invented by Chuck Prenner as assisted by Al Spector, who was in my class and who ended up as IBM’s chief scientist of some stripe. It was also used by Peter Langston to write one of the first (the first?) Empire games. It was so engrossed by that I think Peter and others eventually dropped out after getting lost in it. There’s something very special about those early C listings. We already used Bliss-10 and -11 from CMU, but C was clearly a different take on low level systems programming.