PiDP-8/I Software

Files in src/uwfocal/ of trunk
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U/W FOCAL

FOCAL, the FORmula CALculator was an early interpreted language, pioneered on the PDP-8.

We have a historically accurate FOCAL69 package elsewhere. The University of Washington extended FOCAL significantly. This package is the latest version found of that work, U/W FOCAL.

Upstream is a linctape image on Dave Gesswein's Archive Site

Unfortunately the archive is incomplete.

Assembly instructions found in 16KCPR.PA, say:

/    UWF.BN<16KCPR,12KFNS,8KFIO,8KFPP,16KLIB/L/K=100
/    EAE VERSION:      8XFIO,8XFPP

The non-EAE versions of FIO and FPP have been lost.

The assembly, load, and save lines used are:

UWF16K.BN<16KCPR.PA,12KFNS.PA,8XFIO.PA,8XFPP.PA,16KLIB.PA/K
LOAD RKA1:UWF16K.BN
SAVE RKA1:UWF16K.SV;100

Documentation

CARD1.DA, CARD2.DA, CARD3.DA, and CARD4.DA are reference card text files suitable for display under OS/8. They have been unpacked and reformatted into this tree as doc/uwfocal-refcards.md.

The Latest version of the U/W FOCAL V4E manual was found on archive.org, unpacked, and reformatted into this tree as doc/uwfocalmanual.md.

Additional explanations of how to use U/W FOCAL under SIMH have been crafted into doc/uwfocal-manual-supp.md.

Notes

As of this date, every version of FOCAL I've tried can't accept paste-in from other windows. The characters come in too fast and overrun the input buffer.

I do not like U/W FOCAL's approach to program load and save.

However this archive should build, run, and allow overlays following instructions in NOTE1.TX, NOTE2.TX.