The IBM 1401 Symbolic Programming System (SPS) was an
assembler that was developed by
Gary Mokotoff
Gary Mokotoff (born April 26, 1937) is an author, lecturer, and Jewish genealogy researcher. Mokotoff is the publisher of ''Avotaynu Magazine, AVOTAYNU, the International Review of Jewish Genealogy,'' and is the former president of the IAJGS, Inte ...
, IBM Applied Programming Department, for the
IBM 1401
The IBM 1401 is a variable word length computer, variable-wordlength decimal computer that was announced by IBM on October 5, 1959. The first member of the highly successful IBM 1400 series, it was aimed at replacing unit record equipment for pr ...
computer, the first of the
IBM 1400 series
The IBM 1400 series are second-generation (transistor) mid-range business decimal computers that IBM marketed in the early 1960s. The computers were offered to replace tabulating machines like the IBM 407. The 1400-series machines stored infor ...
. One source indicates that "This programming system was announced by IBM with the machine."
1401 History
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SPS-1 could run on a low-end machine with 1.4K memory, SPS-2 required at least 4K memory.
:SPS-1 punched one card for each input instruction in its first pass and this deck had to be read during pass 2. At the University of Chicago and many other locations, SPS-1 was replaced by assemblers taking advantage of the commonly available 4K memory configuration to pack the output of pass one into several instructions per card. Other assemblers were written which placed the pass one output into memory for small programs.
As the 1400 series matured additional assemblers, programming languages and report generators became available, replacing SPS in most sites.
See also
* Autocoder
* FARGO (programming language)
References
External links
IBM 1401 Symbolic Programming Systems: SPS-1 and SPS-2, C20-1480-0
*"
'" by Tom Van Vleck
Tom Van Vleck is an American computer software engineer.
Life and work
Van Vleck graduated from MIT in 1965 with a BS in Mathematics. He worked on CTSS at MIT, and co-authored its first email program with Noel Morris. In 1965, he joined Project ...
includes a description of an operating environment including 1401 SPS machines.
*
Assembly languages
1401 Symbolic Programming System
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