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Since Robin J. Popplestone's first implementation of COWSEL (COntrolled Working SEt Language) at Leeds University (c1964), the language that was later renamed POP (POP-1) , has been continuously developed and extended, with various additions and implementations, by very many people.
Under the influence of Donald Michie at the Experimental Programming Unit of the University of Edinburgh, COWSEL was renamed POP, standing for Package for Online Programming.
With Rod Burstall, the language was reimplemented from the ground up, for an Elliott 4120. This yielded POP-2 (c1970).
Requiring a multi-processing system capable of supporting a (very) limited number of users, and with a failure to get small discs for the Elliott to work, POP-2 was extended into MULTIPOP, using a shared heap with separate user stacks and the core store.
In the mid-1970s, POP-2 was transferred to the DEC-10 by Julian Davies, who called his implementation POP-10. Later, an extended POP-2, WONDERPOP (called WPOP), was implemented on the DEC-10 by Robert Rae and Allan Ramsay.
In the late 1970s, a research student at Sussex University, John Gibson, decided to concentrate on the development of POP-11 and PROLOG.
POP-11 was the product of a need to choose a language for teaching programming and AI at Sussex University. For a variety of reasons, LOGO, LISP and PROLOG were all rejected, and the decision made to implement POP-2 for a PDP/11. Naturally, Steve Hardy, who was given this task, called the result POP-11.
Later, RSX-11 on the PDP/11 was replaced with UNIX and in 1976, Steve rewrote POP-11 in UNIX assembler.
Around 1980, Jonathan Cunningham developed the first LISP implementation in POP-11. A year or two later, Chris Mellish started to write the first PROLOG system in POP-11.
The introduction of VAX11 computers in 1981 led to a reimplementation of POP-11 for VMS by John Gibson.
Soon after this, the first version of the editor, VED, was developed by Steve Hardy on the PDP/11 and later transferred to the VAX and extended by Aaron Sloman.
In the early 1980s, John Gibson extended the Pop-11 virtual machine to add supporting mechanisms for Chris Mellish and Steve Hardy's PROLOG. Soon after this, the term POPLOG (POP-11/proLOG) started to be applied when referring to the expanded virtual machine.
By 1983, System Designers Ltd., (later on, SD, then SD-Scicon, recently Integral Solutions Ltd., now acquired by SPSS), were commercially marketing POPLOG. Originally, their data mining product, "Clementine", was implemented in Poplog, although in recent years it has been completely reimplemented using Java. Observing that Commom Lisp was emerging as a standard, Jonathan Cunningham supervised SDL's implementation of CLISP within POPLOG, with John Gibson making further extensions to the POPLOG virtual machine.
One of the first object-oriented extensions to POP-11, (LIB FLAVOURS) was developed by Mark Rubinstein. Largely, this has been superceded by Steve Leach's LIB OBJECTCLASS. Steve has gone on to develop SPICE with Chris Dollin.
In the mid-1980s, John Gibson split the POPLOG virtual machine into a high-level POPLOG Virtual Machine (PVM) and a low-level POPLOG Implementation Machine (PIM). This development simplifies both tasks of adding support for a new language and porting the entire system to another architecture.
In 1987, Cognitive Applications Ltd., developed a subset of POP-11 for the Apple Macintosh, called AlphaPop.
In 1994, Robert Duncan implemented the first version of POPLOG for Microsoft Windows. This used a C-based external layer to implement a version of POPLOG that lies mostly within a Dynamic Link Library (DLL).
In 2003, Jonathan Cunningham, Roger Evans and Jeff Best, with the permission of Aaron Sloman, now at Birmingham University, took the source code for FreePoplog, released by Sussex University and ISL, and created OpenPoplog at SourceForge.Net. This version, it is hoped, will attract new developers to carry on developing the system and preserve the value created by so many people over such a long time.
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