Seeking an IPL-V Interpreter

(Part of) the team who recently reanimated the original ELIZA (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42746506) is now working to reanimate what are often considered the first AIs -- the symbolic heuristic programs built by Newell and co at RAND in the 1950. Most of these programs were written in IPL-V, the fascinating (if ugly) machine level language for a stack machine that was the first to introduce list processing, recursion, and symbolic computing, among other innovations that we take for granted today.

There were many implementations of IPL-V. According to the manual (https://bitsavers.org/pdf/rand/ipl/Information_Processing_Language-V_Second_Edition_1964.pdf) implementations existed for at least these machines: B220, CDC 1604 and G-20, Ferranti Mercury, IBM 650, 704, 709-7090, 1620, Philco 2000, UNIVAC 1105 and 1107, and the AN/FSQ-32 (whatever that was). And we know that it was also on the IBM 360 and 7094.

If you have access to a code archive for any of these machines, and can search it for the IPL-V interpreter, we would greatly appreciate it. (A print out is fine -- preferred in fact!) We are building one ourselves in (ironically) Lisp, but it would be amazing to be able to run an original stack, as we did with the 7094->CTSS->MAD stack in reanimating ELIZA.

We (obviously) open source everything we do.

You can post here, or DM me (my email is in my "HN about"). Thanks!


Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42771413

Points: 21

# Comments: 1

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42771413

Created 15d | Jan 20, 2025, 7:10:08 PM


Login to add comment

Other posts in this group

Show HN: Haystack Code Reviewer – Perform code reviews on a canvas

Hi HN!

We’re building Haystack Code Reviewer, a tool that lays out code diffs for a GitHub pull request on an interactive canvas. Instead of scrolling through diffs line-by-line, you can view al

Feb 4, 2025, 8:40:10 PM | Hacker news