Thanks. Unfortunately those documents are largely non-technical. It would be great to find the "NSA-produced ALPHA Language Technical Report that was issued in June 1960" mentioned in your second link.
-----Original Message----- From: Win Treese [mailto:treese@acm.org] Sent: Monday, August 10, 2020 9:09 PM To: Ken Strauss Cc: SIGCIS Listserver Subject: Re: [SIGCIS-Members] In Memoriam - Fran Allen
On Aug 6, 2020, at 1:16 PM, Ken Strauss <ken.strauss@sympatico.ca> wrote:
The obituary mentions her work on Alpha for the NSA (possibly in conjunction with development of the IBM 7950?). Are any details of Alpha available?
Hi, Ken.
Alpha was a language on the IBM 7950 (Harvest) for the NSA's use in writing cryptanalysis applications.
Some links:
- The Wikipedia article on Harvest: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_7950_Harvest gives a little context.
- A declassified 1964 paper by Snyder, "History of NSA [National Security Agency] General-Purpose Electronic Digital Computers" has a little about Alpha (https://www.governmentattic.org/3docs/NSA-HGPEDC_1964.pdf)
- It looks like Allen gave a talk at the Computer History Museum in 2000, but the page about it is just publicity for it: https://computerhistory.org/events/stretchharvest-compiler/
Not a lot that's easy to get to, however.
Best,
Win