Credit: https://github.com/AndrewSav/focal-69
OUR EXPERT
Mike Bedford has used several languages and dabbled in many more. Now he can add FOCAL to that list, and this experience has persuaded him of its place in history, in a curious sort of way.
If you’re an Ubuntu user, there’s a pretty good chance that the word “focal” will bring to mind Focal Fossa, the code name of the Ubuntu 20.04 LTS release. But that’s not our subject here. Instead, we’re delving into a programming language that goes by the name of Formulating On-line Calculations in Algebraic Language (alternatively, FOrmula CALculator, according to some sources), or FOCAL for short. As we shall see, FOCAL is no spring chicken, which is quite appropriate for this, the latest instalment of our series on classic languages, by which we mean old.
FOCAL first saw the light of day all the way back in 1968, when it was introduced by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) for the company’s range of PDP-8 minicomputers, in those pre-personal computer days. It was intended as a simple beginners’ language and, as we’ll see, with just a handful of instructions, it must surely be one of the simplest languages ever devised. You might wonder, given that BASIC, which had appeared four years earlier and had the same philosophy, wasn’t DEC’s beginners’ language of choice, and perhaps it should have been. DEC went on to release FOCAL on its newer and hugely popular PDP-11 minicomputers, which launched in 1970, but it was quickly surpassed on that platform by BASIC, and was soon heading for obscurity. Perhaps the only other platform on which FOCAL made an appearance, back in those days of yore, was the 1974 Altair 8800 microcomputer, which we featured in LXF278 as part of our series on emulating historic computers. Needless to say, though, FOCAL hasn’t escaped the attention of those intent on preserving our heritage, and is now freely available both for Linux and online.
