My first SHARE meeting was in San Francisco in February 1964, and the first session was a report by the "3-by-3" committee to describe what had been rumored as "Fortran 6". It was then called the New Programming Language (NPL). Because the NPL acronym also applied to the UK's National Physical Laboratory (equivalent to the US Bureau of Standards), the name was later changed to PL/I.
The 3x3 team was 3 IBMers (C.W. Medlock, Bernice Weitzenhoffer, and George Radin (later of RISC fame)) and 3 customers (Hans Berg, Jim Cox, and Bruce Rosenblatt (who said he came up with the idea of condition prefixes)). They passed out copies of the language draft. One of the first questions was from someone who noticed that integer variables were 32 bits long; many were worried because current machines in 1964 had 36-bit words. There was a lot of hemming and hawing by the IBMers because System/360 hadn't been announced yet. After much discussion on gent at the back of the room stood up and said "This language should be called FUMBOL -- a mix of FORTRAN, ALGOL, and COBOL". A moment later, another gent said "No, it should be called EBTKS" (pronounced Eb-Tix). Silence. Then he said in a harsh voice "Everything But The Kitchen Sink!". Regards... John ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
