Stories about the B5000 and people who were there (1979)
(<i>I started writing this comment when the submitted title was “The Summer Of 1960 (Time Spent with don knuth)” and the url was specifically the section <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;ed-thelen.org&#x2F;comp-hist&#x2F;B5000-AlgolRWaychoff.html#7" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;ed-thelen.org&#x2F;comp-hist&#x2F;B5000-AlgolRWaychoff.html#7</a> , but it still applies I guess.</i>)<p>There&#x27;s a PDF version at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.computerhistory.org&#x2F;collections&#x2F;catalog&#x2F;102724640" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.computerhistory.org&#x2F;collections&#x2F;catalog&#x2F;10272464...</a>  which incidentally is a scan from a copy given to the Computer History Museum by Donald Knuth himself — before the title “Stories about the B5000…” he has added, in pencil, “Half-true”. :-)<p>Knuth tells his side of this story in video 27 (of 97) of his Web of Stories oral history: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=QeiuVNDQg4k&amp;list=PLVV0r6CmEsFzeNLngr1JqyQki3wdoGrCn&amp;index=28" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=QeiuVNDQg4k&amp;list=PLVV0r6CmEs...</a> — transcript (thanks to <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;kragen&#x2F;knuth-interview-2006" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;kragen&#x2F;knuth-interview-2006</a>):<p>&gt; <i>Some people from Thompson Ramo Wooldridge approached me and said, Don, we understand that you can write compilers. We’re going to put in a proposal to Burroughs to write a compiler for their machine, the Burroughs 205, for a language called ALGOL, which was just being invented at that time […] made a proposal to Burroughs for I believe it was $70,000, to create an ALGOL compiler for the Burroughs 205. The people who made this proposal really, though, were clueless about how to write compilers, so they hired me, a Case senior, to do the job, because they had heard that I knew how to do it. I had done this RUNCIBLE and a couple of versions of other software at Case, […] but Burroughs turned them down; they didn’t give them the contract.</i><p>&gt; <i>So after Burroughs said no, […] maybe I’ll write to Burroughs on my own, and I sent them a letter and said, I’ll, you know, for $5,000 I can write you an ALGOL compiler. Now $5,000 was a huge amount of money in 1959, 1960. I mean a college professor was making $8,000 a year or something like this. So I thought $5,000 was an incredibly rich thing, you know, to do. […]</i><p>&gt; <i>[…] I spent the summer writing this compiler for ALGOL, for the Burroughs 205, and I wrote it, but really I had it only in pencil and paper, I didn’t have it ready to go, and then I would take it with me on, as I went out to Pasadena, and work on it there when I was at the Burroughs plant in Pasadena.</i><p>&gt; <i>So on my way out West; I had a little Volkswagen, that I had gotten from my parents, and I drove 100 miles a day, and got a motel, and sat down, and wrote code, wrote software, and took 30 days to drive from Milwaukee to Pasadena, every day writing a little bit of this software. Then I got to Pasadena, and had all my code, had all my notes, and started putting it on to punched cards, and you know, debugging it and by Christmas time I had their compiler for them […] I heard for the next ten years that people in Brazil were still using it a lot.</i><p>&gt; <i>And so it was a, it was an interesting experience for me, but the most important, from my point of view, was I had $5,500, which was enough to get married. And so in the summer of ‘61 Jill and I got married, and it paid for our honeymoon trip in Europe, which was our first time seeing the world.</i><p>The actual compiler “source code” (written in pencil, assembly language and flowcharts) seems to be this one: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.computerhistory.org&#x2F;resources&#x2F;text&#x2F;Knuth_Don_X4100&#x2F;PDF_index&#x2F;k-2-pdf&#x2F;k-2-c1039-ALGOL-B205.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.computerhistory.org&#x2F;resources&#x2F;text&#x2F;Knuth_Don_...</a><p>There&#x27;s also 43-page “documentation” of the compiler <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.computerhistory.org&#x2F;resources&#x2F;text&#x2F;Knuth_Don_X4100&#x2F;PDF_index&#x2F;k-2-pdf&#x2F;k-2-u2435-B205-ALGOL-internals.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.computerhistory.org&#x2F;resources&#x2F;text&#x2F;Knuth_Don_...</a> which starts with “How does this compiler work? Frankly, it&#x27;s a miracle if it does”.<p>Also in the same interview, he reveals something about how he ended up getting a master&#x27;s degree (as mentioned in the story here):<p>&gt; <i>[…] second half of my freshman year, I started having a little problem with my grades, and so I had to give up ping-pong.</i><p>&gt; <i>But starting in my sophomore — junior year, I found out that you could take graduate courses at Case, and they were easier than the undergraduate courses. The reason is that Case had really strict admissions requirements for undergrads, but they were fairly loose about admitting graduate students. […]</i><p>&gt; <i>And as a result, I had accumulated also, by the time I was a senior, I had accumulated lots and lots of graduate credits. Now, as a result then, Case did, on Graduation Day, Case did an unprecedented thing that had never been done before, they awarded me a Master’s Degree, simultaneously with my Bachelor’s Degree. And this, the faculty had gotten together and [voted] unanimously that this should happen, and I remember, you know, that was another thing that got into the newspapers at the time […] I had taken these graduate courses because they were easier. I didn’t, I don’t know if I’ve ever told anybody else this before today, but that was one of the reasons I could do so many other things.</i>