IBM 1130 - Influence of The 1130

Influence of The 1130

• Brian Utley was the 1130s Project Manager during its development and introduction. Brian said at the third 11/30 party that before IBM Marketing named the 1130 it was known as the Small Engineering Computer System or SECS. The initial architecture was 18 bits but was changed to 16 bits due to the influence of the System/360 development. The full dialogue of his 2005 presentation is available at IBM1130.org.
• Notable software designer Grady Booch got his first exposure to programming on an IBM 1130:

... I pounded the doors at the local IBM sales office until a salesman took pity on me. After we chatted for a while, he handed me a Fortran . I'm sure he gave it to me thinking, "I'll never hear from this kid again." I returned the following week saying, "This is really cool. I've read the whole thing and have written a small program. Where can I find a computer?" The fellow, to my delight, found me programming time on an IBM 1130 on weekends and late-evening hours. That was my first programming experience, and I must thank that anonymous IBM salesman for launching my career. Thank you, IBM.

• LISP guru Guy Steele wrote a LISP interpreter for the IBM 1130 when he was in high school (Boston Latin School, which had an IBM 1130 for student use). His code and documentation for LISP 1.6, along with a summary of current work in getting it to run under simulation, is available at IBM1130.org.
• Chuck Moore wanted to call his new language "Fourth" but the IBM 1130 operating system was limited to five-character names, so it wound up being called FORTH.
• Dan Bricklin creator of the VisiCalc program got his start in programming when he learned and used the IBM 1130 as part of the National Science Foundation Computer/Math Summer Project for high school students, given at the University of Pennsylvania in 1966.
• An IBM 1130 with 8 kilowords of core was used for the world's first full-time Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence research at The Ohio State University Radio Observatory.
• Charles Goldfarb, the father of SGML, describes a job installing a typesetting system based on an IBM 1130 that "eventually changed my career", driving him towards generic markup:

The system was an IBM 1130 computer, a machine the size of a desk with 8KB of main memory, a 512KB disk drive, a Teletype CX paper tape reader and BRPE paper tape punch, and a Photon 713 photomechanical typesetter. The assignment was my first experience with managing a machine-readable document database: I learned to roll the punched paper tape carefully so that it could be stored neatly in cylindrical waste paper baskets.
In the meantime, though I didn't know about it, the roots of generalized markup were being planted. Historically, electronic manuscripts contained control codes or macros that caused the document to be formatted in a particular way ("specific coding"). In contrast, generic coding, which began in the late 1960s, uses descriptive tags (for example, "heading", rather than "format-17").

• Alan Kay used the IBM 1130 in early GUI work for his Ph.D. thesis in 1969.