APL91 Final Report

Transcribed from the printed issue; not yet reviewed. Read it in the PDF of the issue, page 8

We were glad that so many of you could travel to APL91 in this year of uncertain international events and economic problems. We were gratified to hear many compliments and to see the (mostly) positive reviews in the previous Vector. Of course there were some problems. A couple of years ago, when some of us were first thinking of hosting APL91, I thought "Hmm, I've been to a lot of these conferences, I know what I've liked and not liked - sure, we could do this." I can now report that I, for one, have learned my lesson.

Attendance¶

The final full registration was about 370, representing 22 countries. We had an additional 75 spouse and child registrations. About 40 attended the CASE Sunday tutorial, and 30 attended the Sunday introduction to APL tutorial.

Outreach Publicity¶

We undertook several efforts to reach outside the APL community. We sent press releases, calendar notices, and other materials to 700 magazines and newspapers. In California, we sent materials to 200 scientific centers, such as university and corporate research institutes. We sent introductory tutorial fliers to 350 high schools in the Bay Area and 250 college computer science departments.

We solicited vendor interest among producers of word processors to handle APL features and gain access to an international community, of terminal emulators to handle APL communications, and of hardware that runs APL. We even invited a list of Silicon Valley celebrities to the closing picnic. Steve Jobs did give his personal regrets by telephone; John Sculley had his secretary do it for him.

Author Kit and Font Table¶

We were ambitious about contributing to momentum on author tools, since we view the APL publishing problem as one of the reasons it is so difficult to promote APL. We requested author tool proposals from several individuals. The few tool proposals we received were interesting, but not in an "install and go" form that we could pass on. All had dependencies on computer system, word processing software, and APL system. The only tool we were able to publish was an IBM BookMaster style file for the paper format (BookMaster contains standard APL features).

We requested information from all authors on the word processing systems they were using (very few provided this). We solicited WordPerfect and Microsoft as the leading word processing vendors to take a vendor booth and to consider providing an APL font to capture an international market of APL programmers. We included references to some PostScript font work that has been done. Jan Engel, the proceedings editor, is now corresponding with a contact at WordPerfect. IBM is now working on a PostScript APL font for OS/2 Communications Manager.

The Font Table at the conference was conceived as a result of all the troubles we had with publishing APL for the proceedings. We hope this effort will continue in and outside future conferences towards some distinct and "pluggable" solutions.

APL91 Museum (George L. Mendonsa)¶

The APL Museum at the APL91 conference was set up ad hoc toward the end of the conference preparation period, as other more pressing items fell into place. George Mendonsa, with the assistance of Jan Engel, put the Museum together. (Because of its informal nature and set-up a more appropriate term might have been "Scrapbook" instead of "Museum".)

The museum was initiated to take advantage of the historic nature of the conference, a desire to begin to identify APL material of potential interest, and to find out the nature of the interest in such an endeavour. Calls for contributions to the museum were made to likely sources in part suggested by the APL91 committee. These people in turn suggested other sources. Contributors were asked to provide materials in one of 2 categories:

1. Items of Historical interest in the evolution of the APL milieu.
2. Related items of APL interest which were not necessarily historical.

We had about 25 to 30 contributors who included APL92, Linda Alvord, Ev Alan, Paul Berry, Larry Breed, Jim Brown, Carl Cheney, Ed Cherlin, Jan Engel, Adin Falkoff, Garth Foster, Vern Griffith, Interprocess, Curtis Jones, Ken Iverson, Gene McDonnell, Don Mattern, George Mendonsa, Don Peter, Marilyn Pritchard, Lynn Shaw, Bob Stephan, STSC, Rex Swain, and Joey Tuttle. The Museum was coordinated by George Mendonsa. Larry Breed had an extensive collection of items and was available at the Museum for much of the time. Lew Robinson, Jan Engel, Bob Stephan, Carl Cheney also acted as Docents at various times.

Items on display included buttons, books, papers, documents, and items from previous APL conferences such as The APL jig-saw puzzle, APL Tool-kit, Apple Blossom Time record, 1130 keyboard, Proceedings, T-shirts, etc. Larry provided the listing of the very first logon to APL. This was duplicated and handed out at the conference. Linda Alvord had sent The APL Genealogy project report (begun at APL88) which was displayed and added to at the conference by over 100 individuals. Don Mattern demonstrated his Ampere WS-1 APL laptop. Don Peter set up an on going demo of the IBM 5110. We also had a book as a memorial to Alan Perlis, Mike Montalbano, and Bill Bergquist which included some of their works. Interprocess had a collection of 40 APL buttons.

The Museum was well attended with over one half of the conference attendees stopping by. As indicated there does seem to be a interest such a facility at conferences.

Let us be very clear: this was a one time experimental event. The museum ceased to exist at the end of the conference. All items with a few exceptions were picked up by the contributors when the Museum closed. There was an attempt at the conference to determine who was interested in creating some such repository. Although a few expressed interest, no formal funded organization is in place. If you are interested in such a function, perhaps you could volunteer to your national APL organization.

It may be difficult to have an actual museum, but an on-going Ad Hoc portable museum (or scrap-book) could be put together for future conferences (as was demonstrated by this one). But even more important would be a repository. This would be a listing of items of interest that people had that: 1. they would like to contribute to a museum or 2. they would retain themselves but would like other people to know about.

Further, a repository could be created for each country and perhaps maintained and exchanged through the national APL organizations. Also, the genealogy project could continue as an ongoing activity in each Museum.