{"id":103869,"date":"2020-06-16T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2020-06-16T14:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/?p=103869"},"modified":"2020-06-16T07:19:52","modified_gmt":"2020-06-16T14:19:52","slug":"20200616-00","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/20200616-00\/?p=103869","title":{"rendered":"Excuse me, has anybody seen the FOCAL interpreter?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>One of my now-retired colleagues joined Microsoft <a href=\"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/20130726-00\/?p=3693\"> back in the early days when Steve Ballmer was the mail boy<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>As I noted, the company at the time was very small. An order arrived in the mail (because that&#8217;s how you ordered software back then) for a copy of what I vaguely recall was Microsoft <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/FOCAL_(programming_language)\"> FOCAL<\/a>, but don&#8217;t quote me on that. (I used to a have a copy of a FOCAL manual, but I misplaced it decades ago.)<\/p>\n<p>FOCAL was a simple interpreted programming language similar to BASIC in many ways, but far less popular. Orders for it came in very infrequently.<\/p>\n<p>The FOCAL software was available on paper tape, or if you wanted to splurge, you could order it on plastic tape for extra durability.<\/p>\n<p>Anyway, the order came in, the first order in ages. But there was a problem: Nobody could find the master tape! We lost our only copy of the software.<\/p>\n<p>The order had to be canceled, with an apology that the product had been discontinued.<\/p>\n<p>What we didn&#8217;t mention is that it was discontinued because we had lost it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I thought <I>you<\/I> had it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1069,"featured_media":111744,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[2],"class_list":["post-103869","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-oldnewthing","tag-history"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"<p>I thought <I>you<\/I> had it.<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103869","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1069"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=103869"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103869\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=103869"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=103869"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=103869"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}