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.