At the Beginning, There Were Two - Inventing the PC - page 12

York APL reference card,
1972. (Source: York University
Special Collections.)
could provide. In short, under APL \360, York's computer would
become a dedicated APL machine unable to support any non-
APL users. “There was no way that York could afford anything
like that,” said Ramer. “So I started out in my spare time to
write an [ APL ] interpreter and I actually got the thing running
within a year. And it was running well enough that we could
supply APL to a few people [simultaneously], so it became fairly
useful.”
York APL was a clever reworking of APL \360. Due to its low
memory requirements, it could coexist with other software in-
stalled on a modest mainframe computer. This, and other unique
features not offered by APL \360, such as file manipulation func-
tions and the ability to communicate with the operating system,
attracted a number of universities and research institutions that