APL86 Exhibition Report

Transcribed from the printed issue; not yet reviewed. Read it in the PDF of the issue, page 71

APL in Action was the theme of the conference, and the exhibition demonstrated this in a striking way. The first thing that was immediately obvious from the exhibition was that never before has APL been in action on so many different machines in so many different forms. I counted 12 different makes (ie: manufacturers) of equipment with APL running within the exhibition. This excludes different models of machine from the same manufacturer and dial-up links to external mainframes, as well as the lengthy lists of other equipment supported displayed on several stands. APL has clearly joined the Age of the Micro in a big way! Similarly encouraging was the number of APL software products on display for use by both APL and non-APL users.

Another overall impression of the exhibition was the contrast with the conference sessions, in which APL2 and APL interpreter differences were so much to the fore. Even on the IBM stand the only mention of APL2 as such was the video featuring the familiar voice of the ubiquitous Jim Brown. Machines and operating systems supported, speed and power, software packages available and general support or ancilliary functions were emphasised everywhere, but little mention of language features as such was made. Indeed the sense was of a common enthusiasm for APL in general and a determination to see it yet more widely in action, although naturally each supplier was keen to emphasise their own particular contribution and the benefits of their particular products. The dominance of micros in the exhibition was also not reflected in the number of the conference papers relating to micros, though there were some excellent contributions.

The exhibition stands gave a pleasing impression of professionalism and thorough preparation. Those on the First Floor seemed to be better off being on the same floor as all the lecture theatres, and seemed generally better frequented. Most stands, though, were busy during breaks, and had a steady flow of people even during conference proceedings. I would think most of the exhibitors should have been satisfied with the flow of people to their stands.

So what of the stands themselves – what was there to be seen? To avoid offence I will describe them in stand number order.

Stand B1 on the Ground Floor was the bookstall, which was useful but unexciting, having mainly the familiar titles from the APL Book Service. Orders could be given, though, so it provided a useful opportunity to buy or order all those books that you had been meaning to get for ages but had never quite got round to ordering!

Next door Stand B2 was showing the Ampere micro, and seemed to be relatively quiet most of the time. The Ampere is distinguished by being the first (and only??) micro with APL as the standard language, and by having not ROM or tape or floppy disk access to programs and data, but all three! One or two external 3.5in. floppy disk drives are an optional extra and microcassette drive and ROM slots are standard. It also has communications facilities with a built-in autodial speaker phone and 300 baud modem. Like many lap-tops it suffers from a hard-to-read LCD screen, particularly under the direct glare of fluorescent lights as in the exhibition. It is an individual machine, both in looks and configuration and must now face serious competition from some of the more recent PC-compatible lap-tops.

I.P. Sharp Associates had Stand B3-B4, where the theme was the Global Information Centre concept, and the emphasis on the services, facilities and packages which Sharp’s offer. The latest of the software products is Logos, a powerful and interesting product for managing and administering application development and maintenance. A logical extension of the familiar function file (or “paging”) concept, Logos provides a variety of tools for developing code through a full-screen editor, documenting it and storing prior versions after editing, and assembling test or production workspaces from any combination of objects on the Logos files. It keeps track of the occurrences of every object and can disseminate updates, as well as documenting them. It is of value, therefore, to both the programmer and the manager in providing assistance to the former and control for the latter through the discipline and documentation it imposes. Viewpoint is the Sharp Information Centre product and a worthy, and more attractive, competitor for IBM’s Infocenter/1. The sad thing for non-Sharp users is that Sharp APL is a prerequisite for these products, and this plus the cost involved makes it a major strategic decision to make use of them. IPSA, of course, still has its extensive international network and timesharing facility, familiar packages such as Magic and Mabra and a vast range of numeric databases. There is also the Mailbox facility, and Sharp terminals were much in demand for reading the daily mail by the Sharp users present! It is a personal annoyance to me to hear so much talk of the wonders of Electronic Mail, particularly in relation to PC’s, when I was using Mailbox, with telex interface some 10 years ago! Whilst the IPSA private network is a different concept from a national service like Telecom Gold, I do feel that the impression given is that electronic mail is new, and we know differently, don’t we! Altogether the Sharp stand was effective in appearance and interesting in content.

The next 3 stands B5 to B7 were publicity stands for the British APL Association, our worthy hosts, ACM (Association of Computing Machinery), our worthy sponsers, and APL87, our willing hosts next time in Dallas! The call for papers was going out from the APL87 stand, but although without a stand the organisers of APL88 in Sydney were doing their best, with glossy brochures and newsletter registration, to upstage even the Texans – no mean feat!

IBM occupied spacious accommodation on Stand B8-11, with the latest releases of PC APL and Application Prototyping Environment (APE) and Infocenter/1 (IC/1) the main products on display. The new release of PC APL seems to be a big improvement over the original one, and now perhaps compares with APL*PLUS/PC, but it may be too late to recover much of the market which seems to have gone largely to the latter up to now. Infocenter/1 is IBM’s main Information Centre product, and is based around former products ADRS2, ADI and FPS coupled with, under APL2, the interface to SQL. With full-screen front-end encompassing all these facilities as well as graphics, it is an obvious and useful progression for former users of one or more of the previous products. It is also a good front-end for those wishing to make extensive use of the SQL interface. The list of prerequisite software includes APE, whose new release is available exclusively in APL2, the first IBM product in this area not to support VSAPL. APE is an application development tool, providing extensive facilities for screen design, graphics and query building. For relatively simple applications it provides a good range of utilities, though at the cost, as with IC/1, of considerable software cost and processing overhead. Of minority interest, but doubtless exciting to those directly affected, IBM were also showing an implementation of Japanese APL – who says APL symbols are hard to read! Generally a smart, professional but unexciting display overall.

The final stand on the Ground Floor was APL People at B12. The APL People stand had on display, well, what do you expect, PEOPLE! Very friendly and helpful people, and a definite place to stop if your problem was not hardware to use or APL to run on it but fingers to go on the keyboard. As well as APL recruitment and consultancy services, APL People are now agents for Interprocess, who supply the AFM shared file software and other enhancements to VSAPL. They also have several vertical market specialist interests. So there was little to see on this stand, but if your needs were manpower or advice it could have been a valuable stop.

On the busier First Floor the first stand was MicroAPL. Now the full owners of the APL.68000 interpreter MicroAPL are busy porting it to a number of popular 68000 machines, including the Macintosh, Atari ST and Commodore Amiga. With APL already on the QL, it certainly won’t be MicroAPL’s fault if APL does not start to reach a wider ’home’ audience, particularly with their enthusiastic support for the WIMP environment (apologies to the gentleman who was offended by the use of this term which he felt denigrated some excellent tools!). (Ed: Windows, Icons, Mice, Pop-up menus). The problem for them, and APL in general, must be how to create the awareness of and demand for APL in a new market area. The main strength of MicroAPL still lies, however, in the business area. As well as possible sales with the above machines, their main products are the Spectrum and new Aurora machines with APL.68000 under the Mirage operating system. The Aurora is certainly impressive in performance, with the possibility of multiple 68020 32-bit processors and a 68000 chip controlling the disk drives. MicroAPL are also branching out into consultancy and promoting the Integrated APL Strategy concept involving not just their own hardware but a variety of software modules to run with a range of configurations. Though slightly out of the mainstream of IBM mainframe or PC compatible APL implementation, MicroAPL offer an impressively functional and powerful option for many situations.

Next to MicroAPL on stands C4-C6 was Cocking and Drury, placing emphasis on their role as software suppliers rather than their their traditional strength of consultancy. Cocking and Drury now form the sole UK distributors of STSC mainframe products, including APL*PLUS, and the European support for them. They also supply all the STSC PC products, including the new product releases which were announced at the conference. These include release 6 of APL*PLUS/PC, with the object size limitation of 64K finally removed without performance degradation for arrays less than 64K, it was stated. Also announced was release 3 of APL*PLUS/UNX and version 2 of Statgraphics. Statgraphics is an excellent example of the software packages in APL mentioned earlier. With the boost of a highly favourable review in a major PC magazine it has become a highly visible and accepted PC product in a market much wider than just APL specialists. To the average PC user its APL origin is irrelevant, but at the same time it provides an extra dimension for the experienced APL’er. Another interesting new release in the PC Tools range was the Spreadsheet Manager, which provides a simple APL spreadsheet environment, but more importantly can read and write Lotus files for creation or manipulation in APL*PLUS/PC. this provides valuable integration between APL and spreadsheet applications. The stand had an impressive variety of IBM compatible micro hardware, with demonstrations available of all the products being promoted. There was, of course, also details of the consultancy and training services offered by Cocking and Drury available. It was an attractive and busy stand, and well staffed with helpful and knowledgeable people.

Just opposite at C7 was Mercia Software, who also supply STSC micro products as well as a number of mainframe APL products. The mainframe products include Execucalc/Execuplot spreadsheet/graphics package and Infocentre, a competitor of the similarly named IBM product and Sharp’s Viewpoint. All run in either VSAPL or APL*PLUS. The STSC PC products were on display, including Statgraphics and APL*PLUS/PC, plus the EXEC*U*STAT graphics package. The latter has strong similarities with Statgraphics, but with emphasis on the general business rather than highly statistical user. It has a simplified front-end, along with extras such as diary and calculator, but with some of the statistical functions missing. A good product which fills a gap between a very simple business graphics packages and an advanced statistical package like Statgraphics. Most interesting of all on their stand was the low-cost multi-user and networking software Multilink and LANlink. Multilink will allow an AT or compatible to become a multi-user machine supporting 3 users for around the cost of an additional PC, including two terminals, with a theoretical limit of 9 users. The LANlink product has similar software to allow PC’s to be networked without network cards by using RS232 connections via serial ports. Both have the speed limitations one would expect from such low-cost solutions, but if they fit your particular requirements the price/performance could be very attractive. Mercia also provided details of their training and consultancy services from their small but business-like stand. They also provided a valuable service at the end of the week in matching badge numbers for the STSC competition!

Next in line was the Dyadic Systems stand C8-C9 featuring Dyalog APL. Perhaps the most significant comment on Dyalog was the popularity of the kit on this stand for solving the conference competitions! It may not be what it was there for, but it must say something about both the interpreter and the harware on display that it was so heavily used. Dyalog is without doubt the closest to APL2 of other “enhanced” APL’s, which must be added attraction for users into Unix in a big way. As well as a number of APL2 features, Dyalog has some interesting aspects of its own, such as “external variables”. There was also a good deal of technical interest, with Dyalog running on the IBM 6150 (PC/RT) RISC machine in the hospitality suite upstairs. This machine could be the one to bring wider acceptance for both Unix and Dyalog APL, bearing the magic blue letters as it does. On the stand the Sun micro was in use, which both Dyadic and STSC spoke very highly of for sheer performance. There was also the Dyalog APL co-processor, based on the Opus532 Personal Mainframe board which has a 32-bit NS32000 processor. It provides a full Unix V/Dyalog implementation on an expansion board for IBM PC’s and compatibles, with PC- DOS/MS-DOS interface and again opens a potentially fruitful market. For sheer technical interest this good-looking stand was hard to beat, though Dyalog’s fortunes are clearly intimately tied up with those of Unix in general and thus currently, in the UK at least, are linked to something of a specialist market.

Even more specialist was the APL Machine from Analogic on their stand. Featuring enormous power from its array processing architecture, it has considerable attraction for CPU intensive applications. Unfortunately the stand was usually unattended in the latter part of the week, and I was unable to see the machine in action. It is clearly of interest only for specific applications areas, but within those areas must be hard to match for performance.

The centre of the floor was taken up by STSC with stands C11-C20. They were showing all of the products and new releases announced as mentioned above, and had additional booths for their UK and French distributors Cocking and Drury and Uniware. They also had APL*PLUS on the Macintosh, in competition with MicroAPL. APL*PLUS/UNX was running on a Sun micro, as was Dyalog on the Dyadic stand, and the seriousness with which STSC take the competition from Dyalog in the Unix area can be judged by their attempt to tempt users of “other” Unix APLs with a 25% rebate offer for “trade-ins”. MicroAPL also offer APL under Unix, of course, but their emphasis is more on the Mirage or proprietary operating systems. Most encouraging for the spread of APL in general was evidence of STSC’s vigorous activity in the educational area and their software publishing scheme. The stand was smart and spacious, but most of the products have been described elsewhere so there is not a lot to say about it.

Although not part of the the exhibition on the two main floors, mention must also be made of the Merlin spreadsheet package on display from Butel on the second floor. This is a spreadsheet written in APL to be run in VSAPL on a mainframe or on a PC using a run-time version of APL*PLUS/PC. Whilst having a rather different appearance to the traditional spreadsheet packages it is nevertheless a genuine competitor for them in terms of function and ease of use even for a non-APL’er. As with other APL packages the possibility of calling user-defined functions further increases its flexibility in the hands of someone who does know APL. The screen handling is cleverly structured such that it is virtually identical on the PC to the mainframe without seeming to sacrifice too much of the superior screen handling generally available on the micro. The reporting parameters allow much better reports to be created than from most spreadsheets. Like Statgraphics in the graphics area this product is a worthy competitor for established packages in its own right, and for APL’ers has the added attraction of access to APL. The mainframe version also has now or under development links to a number of the most popular database products. It was a shame that this demonstration was hidden away upstairs and not classified as part of the exhibition proper.

So there you have a quick tour of the APL86 exhibition. I hope it brings back (accurate) memories for those who were there and gives those who weren’t an idea of what they missed!.