Meeting of the Board of I-APL and other Interested Parties on 6th August 1989 at the New York Hilton

Transcribed from the printed issue; not yet reviewed. Read it in the PDF of the issue, page 29

Present: Anthony Camacho, Ed Cherlin, Paul Chapman, Dave Ziemann, Norman Thomson, Garry Helzer, Linda Alvord, Sylvia Camacho, Rolf Levenbach, Per Gjerlov, Kim Andreasen, Lee Dickey, Ed Shaw, George Cherlin, Tama Traberman, Curtis Jones.

Anthony Camacho opened with a suggested Agenda:

(1) Last year’s Minutes
(2) Commercial decisions
(3) Progress to date
(4) Plans for Conference
(5) AOB

(1) Last Year’s Minutes¶

Minutes from last year were taken as read (see Vector Vol.4 No.4).

(2) Commercial Decisions¶

Anthony Camacho suggested the commercial decisions to be taken as:

1. Whether to stock and distribute Norman Thomson’s “APL for the Mathematics Classroom”.
2. Whether to print a manual and distribute TryAPL2.
3. Whether to distribute Sharp APL PC.

In order to do these things I-APL would have to become a profit making (though not profit distributing) organisation which would pay royalties to authors and commercial rates for other work. So far I-APL has not paid anything but expenses to its board members. To make it possible for them to continue the work payment is becoming essential.

Anthony said he would like to hear the opinion of all present on whether I-APL could make this change with a good conscience. Each in turn spoke to this point and there were several differences of emphasis.

Ed Cherlin stated his need to generate cash flow to pay for publicity, admin effort and distribution. Ed favoured extending the products carried with this end in view.

Norman Thomson supported this view and suggested adding paid consultancy.

Paul Chapman suggested other possible products.

Ed Shaw expressed fears that extending the product range would overstretch the organisation (evidence being that he has not yet been invoiced for some stock).

Lee Dickey would support a move to increase the number of distributors.

Dave Ziemann expressed support for increasing the product range providing the effort can be found and that it would not alienate the contributors.

George Cherlin suggested applying for a National Science Foundation grant.

There was general agreement that I-APL must not be seen to favour any commercial vendor or any flavour of enhanced APL.

The proposal that I-APL should move towards being a more commercial enterprise was passed nem con. The proposal to carry other APL products was carried 7 in favour, 2 against and the rest abstaining. The implied advice was that the Chairmen should only do it if there was no danger of diverting effort from important work such as ports to school machines.

(3) Progress to Date¶

Anthony Camacho reported:

• Well over 1000 copies of I-APL have been sold.
• The manual has gone into a second edition including BBC and Archimedes machines. [After doing the basic port to these machines without payment, the porter was paid £800 to provide DFILE, graphics, sound and colour interfaces.]
• Tama Traberman’s ‘APL in Social Studies’ has been printed and added to the product list.
• Norman and Linda’s Tutorial has been revised and reprinted.
• Garry has revised An Encyclopedia of APL and the second edition has been printed.
• The current financial position is that there is about £2000 in the U.K. bank account and £19,000 (at full selling price) of stock.
• The BAA has paid for production and mailing of the Education section of Vector to the 1400-1500 I-APL mailing list at an approx. cost to them of £600 per quarter. There seems to be no reason why they won’t continue to do this - it is bringing them new members.
• There are porters working on Apple, Amstrad, Atari, Macintosh, CP/M and Transputer machines but none for Commodore 64.
• Paul has produced a 32-bit version of I-APL which is currently ported to the Archimedes and gives workspace up to the memory installed. It also runs faster than the version with 16 bit addresses as in that version each address has to be reduced to 16 bits by masking. This 32-bit version can be distributed in the same way as I-APL. As workspaces will not be loadable from the 16-bit into the 32-bit or vice versa, we feel it necessary to provide means to transfer workspaces between the two systems before issuing any 32-bit version.
• Paul has also produced a compiled and speeded up version for the Archimedes which he would like to earn royalties on and charge a higher price for.
• The 32-bit IAPL.DEB file will run with an appropriate DEGO on any 32-bit machine. It could therefore be ported to 68000 and 80386 machines and give workspaces up to the size of the memory. It was agreed that such ports could be commissioned and issued.

Rolf Levenbach reported progress on the Apple Port. Most of testport was working and he was part of the way to )SAVE and )LOAD but when he tried the complete interpreter it crashed after displaying the sign-on message. Paul agreed to spend some time with him to see whether he could help. Anthony said that when the interpreter was working, I-APL would pay Rolf to write DFILE and provide appropriate access to colour, graphics and any other Apple ][ facilities.

(4) Plans for the Conference¶

Ed Cherlin asked for volunteers to man the I-APL Booth, received 6, but in the event this did not happen.

(5) AOB¶

Per Gjerlov asked that there should be some I-APL papers at APL90 and that some information on the 32-bit version and experience with I-APL in Schools should be included.