IVSYS/7090

IVSYS/7090 (for "Iverson System" on the IBM 7090) was a proto-APL interpreter in FORTRAN. It was implemented by Larry Breed, who worked in Ken Iverson's group at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center, and Phil Abrams, a graduate student at Stanford University. Running in 1965, the interpreter was the second computer implementation of Iverson notation, after PAT, and is often considered the first APL implementation, as it preceded APL\360. However, it had substantial differences from APL as realized in APL\360, for example using the arrows  and   for rotation rather than Take and Drop. Initially the program had to entered with punch cards, encoding symbols as multiple characters. However, it was soon adapted to run with a typewriter and type ball, and made available within IBM using the Time Sharing Monitor (TSM), an early time sharing system. Ken Iverson and Adin Falkoff were able to use the system in teaching, and Eric Iverson to prepare an answer book for the problems in Ken's Elementary Functions. IVSYS was only available in this way for a short time, as the TSM project was terminated to make programmers available for a similar project, TSS/360. The machine IVSYS itself ran on was at some point put on a shipping platform and taken to an unknown destination.