COSMIC BASEBALL ASSOCIATION Omegatropolis Procoders 2005 Team Roster

2005 Omegatropolis Procoders

Player	Position
ALGOL	P
BASIC	OF
C++	P
COBOL	P
CP/M	1B
dBase II	3B
DOS	SS
Fortran	P
Java	P
Linux	SS
LISP	P
Lotus123	LF
Mosaic	2B
NetWare	CF
Pascal	P
Perl	P
PLATO	OF
UNIX	C
Windows	C
WordStar	IF

Player Details

PLAYER	POS	DESCRIPTION	TYPE
ALGOL	P	1958. (ALGOrithmic Language). Developed jointly by a committee of European and American computer scientists, ALGOL became the standard way to report algorithms in print for almost 30 years. John Backus developed the Backus normal form method of describing programming languages specifically for ALGOL 58. It was revised and expanded by Peter Naur to the Backus-Naur form for ALGOL 60. ALGOL 60 inspired many languages that followed it (Pascal, for example); the canonical quote in this regard is C. A. R. Hoare's "ALGOL was a great improvement on its successors."	High-level. 2GL programming language.
BASIC	OF	1964. Beginner's All Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code. The original BASIC language was invented in 1964 by John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz at Dartmouth College and implemented by a team of Dartmouth students under their direction. BASIC was designed to allow students to write programs using time-sharing computer terminals. It was a computer language designed specifically for the new class of users the time-sharing systems allowed � that is, a "simpler" user. Currently there are over one hundred "dialects" of the BASIC language. With the advent of the microcomputer revolution in the 1980s, BASIC enjoyed new popularity.	High-level. 2GL programming language
C++	P	1983. An object-oriented programming language based on the "C" language. "C" was primarily developed by Dennis Ritchie while working at Bell Labs in New Jersey and designed to work with UNIX-based computers. Dr. Bjarne Stroustrup, author of The C++ Programming Language, designed most of the new language, with additional contributions from Brian Kernighan and other Bell Labs staff.	High-level, object oriented general use programming language
COBOL	P	1959. A business-oriented computer programming language long considered the standard data processing language in the business world. Collaboratively designed by the Conference on Data System Languages (CODASYL), led by Joe Wegstein, COBOL's origins can be found in the Flowmatic computer language designed by Grace Hopper in 1952.	High-level. 2GL programming language.
CP/M	1B	1973. Control Program for Microcomputer (Control Program/Monitor). A computer language written by Gary Kildall under contract to Intel. CP/M was the first popular operating system software for personal computers. In his online Computer Timeline Ken Polsson writes that CP/M was the operating system Bill Gates bought a rip-off of to create MS-DOS in 1981. The earliest versions of WordStar and dBase were designed to run on CP/M systems. In 1988 CP/M in its updated form was renamed DR-DOS by the Digital Research Corporation.	Operating system software
dBase II	3B	1981. dBase II was a repackaged version of Vulcan (JPLDIS, "dBase I"). Vulcan was written by Wayne Ratliff when he worked at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. It was ported to CP/M and became dBase II, the first relational database program for the microcomputer.	Database application
DOS (MS)	SS	1981. Microsoft-Disk Operating System. A revised version of QDOS created by Tim Patterson in August 1980. Patterson owned the Seattle Computer Products Company. Paul Allen of Microsoft acquires the rights to Patterson's DOS in July 1981. Microsoft renames it MS-DOS (v.1.0) and licenses the operating system to IBM who will include it in their new IBM PC microcomputer. Eventually seven versions of MS-DOS will be released between 1981 and 1994. MS-DOS v7.0 was included with the Windows 95 operating system, and has, since 1994, been dying a slow death.	Operating system software
FORTRAN	P	1957. FORmula TRANslating System. Developed by John Backus for use primarily in the scientific research community. Originally designed to run on an IBM 704 computer. FORTRAN II was released in 1958; FORTRAN III (short-lived); FORTRAN IV (1962). The ANSI FORTRAN Standard was published in 1977. The latest version is FORTRAN 90, summarized in ANSI X3.198-1992.	High-level. 2nd Generation programming language.
Java	P	1994.� The Java programming language was the accidental fruit of the "Green Project" initiated at Sun Microsystems in 1991. The mission of the Green Project was to explore and plan for the "next wave" in computing. While looking for the next wave in the consumer electronic appliances arena, the Green team bumped into the burgeoning Internet. Originally Java was called "Oak" because that was the type of tree outside of James Gosling's office. Gosling was the lead engineer and key architect of the new technology. Java's syntax is similar to the "C" programming language and it is a pure object-oriented language which produces "bytecode" instructions for the Java Virtual Machine. On May 23, 1995, Sun Microsystems announced the official commercial "birth" of Java.	High-level programming language
Linux	SS	1991. Linux is a Unix-like multitasking, multi-user 32 and 64 bit operating system for a variety of hardware platforms and licensed under an open source license. Linus Torvalds, a computer science student in Finland, wrote the initial Linux code in the summer of 1991 but Linux v1.0 was not released until March, 1994. Linux is part of the "open source" movement. Supporters of the "open source" concept, which allows anyone to freely view, modify, and distribute software code, believe that such an approach will result in higher quality, less expensive software.	Operating system software
LISP	P	1958. LISt Processor. Developed at Massachusetts Institute of Technology by John McCarthy. The programming language of choice in the area of artificial intelligence research. LISP was developed because there was a need to process symbolic data in lists. The essential data structure of the LISP language is an ordered sequence of elements called a "list." Lists can be made up of "atoms" which are irreducible and/or other lists. By 1965 the primary dialect of LISP was created (version 1.5). In 1992, X3J13 group published the American National Standard for Common LISP.	High-level, 2GL programming language.
Lotus 123	LF	1983. On July 1979 an investment consultant for Morgan Stanley wrote about an electronic spreadsheet program designed to run on a microcomputer. The spreadsheet program was VisiCalc. In 1980 Mitch Kapor, employed at Personal Software, Inc., VisiCalc's marketer, wrote the VisiPlot and VisiTrend programs to supplement VisiCalc. Those programs made him a millionaire and in 1981 he started the Lotus Development corporation. Lotus 123, a VisiCalc like spreadsheet program designed to run on the IBM PC was released. In four months, based in part on a brilliant marketing campaign conceived by marketing consultant Jim Manzi, Lotus 123 was the number one selling software on the market. 1983 revenues for the spreadsheet software were $53 million. In 1984 revenues were $156 million. By 1986 2 million copies of the software had been sold.	Electronic spreadsheet application
Mosaic	2B	1993. Development on version 0.1a began in June 1993. Version 1.0 was released November 11, 1993. Developed by Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina, members of the National Center for Supercomputer Applications (NCSA) Software Design Group at the University of Illinois. In 1994 Mosaic became Netscape just as the World Wide Web was becoming phenomenally popular. Browser software allows a user to access web pages. The "browser wars" began in 1995 as Microsoft released the first version of its browser application, Internet Explorer (IE). In 1995 70% of the Fortune 100 companies used Netscape as their internet browser. By the end of 1998, IE had edged slightly ahead of Netscape. That same year, Netscape merged with AOL. Today Internet Explorer is the de facto browser standard.	Internet browser application
NetWare	CF	1983. The first network operating system (NOS) based on file-server technology designed for local area networks (LANs). NetWare was first released in 1983. It was based on the Xerox Network Systems (XNS) protocols designed in the late 1970s. The function of an NOS is to provide transparent remote file access and numerous other distributed network services, including printer sharing and support for various applications such as electronic mail transfer and database access. NetWare dominated the small to medium-sized business LAN market in the late 1980s into the 1990s. However, despite being considered a superior product NetWare has lost much of its original market-share due to strategic business mistakes.	Network operating system
Pascal	P	1971. Dr. Niklaus Wirth of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH-Zurich), and a member of the original group that created ALGOL, published, in 1971, his specification for a highly-structured language which resembled ALGOL in many ways. He named it Pascal after the 17th-century French philosopher and mathematician who built a working mechanical digital computer. Pascal is very data-oriented, giving the programmer the ability to define custom data types. With this freedom comes strict type-checking, which ensured that data types didn't get mixed up. Pascal was intended as a teaching language, and was widely adopted as such. Pascal is free-flowing, unlike FORTRAN, and reads very much like a natural language, making it very easy to understand code written in it.	High-level, 3GL programming language
Perl	P	1987. Practical Extraction and Reporting Language. (aka Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister). Perl was created by Larry Wall and released to the alt.comp.sources newsgroup on October 18, 1987. Wall developed Perl originally as a data reduction language (that is, a language that is capable of consuming large quantities of data in an efficient manner and performing some function(s) on it). Perl is almost the perfect tool for system administrators since it allows the easy manipulation of files, process information, and many other items. Perl is also great for people who write cgi-bin scripts to process web forms because it has so many useful string manipulation functions.	High-level, 3GL programming language
PLATO	OF	1960. PLATO I (Programmed Logic for Automatic Teaching Operation) was written by Donald L. Bitzer at the University of Illinois. PLATO was the first computer system designed for general educational use. Eventually the several thousand-terminal system served undergraduate education as well as elementary school reading, a community college in Urbana, and several campuses in Chicago. The PLATO system consists of hardware and software. Ray Ozzie, a software engineer who worked on PLATO, would later use his experience with PLATO to create the Lotus Notes groupware application. PLATO became a propriety product of the Control Data Corporation in 1976. It never succeeded commercially and eventually CDC sold the program. The PLATO software and technology is now owned by PLATO Inc. in Minneapolis.	Mainframe-based computer education system program
UNIX	C	1969. Written by Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie and designed to run on the Digital Equipment PDP-11 computer at Bell Labs in New Jersey. The name UNIX was a pun on the name "Multics" an earlier failed program at Bell Labs. Originally written in assembler language UNIX was re-written in C during 1972-1973. Initially designed to let a number of programmers access the computer at the same time and share its resources, UNIX grew in functionality. Its multi-user, multitasking capabilities have made UNIX a popular operating system for internet host computers. There is some debate about who owns UNIX. In 1992 Novell, makers of NetWare bought UNIX from AT&T. In 1995 Novell sold UNIX to the Santa Cruz Operation (SCO). The nature of that sale and other related issues have been the subject of law suits and controversies.	Operating system software
Windows	C	1985. In 1981 Bill Gates saw a demonstration of a graphical user interface (GUI) called VisiOn. In November, 1983 Microsoft announced its plans for a GUI called Windows (originally called Interface Manager). Windows 1.0 was released in November, 1985 and received a lukewarm reception. Versions of Windows prior to Windows 95 (released in 1994) were operating environments. With Windows 95 Windows evolved into an operating system.	Graphical user interface and operating system software
WordStar	IF	1978. WordStar was a word processor application, published my MicroPro. Originally written for the CP/M operating system and released in September 1978, it was later available for DOS-based microcomputers (WordStar 3.0 released in April, 1982.) Written by an assembly code programmer, John Robbins Barnaby, and marketed by MicroPro's president, Seymour Rubinstein, WordStar became the dominant word processing software for the microcomputer until the mid 1980s. At that time, WordStar began losing market share to programs like WordPerfect and Microsoft Word. By 1990, WordStar was a relic, used by a dwindling group of loyalists.	Word processing application

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Software

The OMEGATROPOLIS PROCODERS are a non-humanoid cosmic baseball team created on January 23, 2005. The Procoders will compete during the 2005 cosmic playing season in the Lower League. The team is composed of a variety of software including high-level programming languages, disk operating systems, electronic spreadsheet applications, and other types of software.

According to the May 27, 2000 issue of Science News the earliest known use of the term "software" dates back to 1958. John W. Tukey used the word in an article published in the January 1958 issue of the American Mathematical Monthly. Tukey, a statistics professor at Princeton, had already been credited, in 1946, with coining the computer term "bit" (binary digit).

The word "software" covers a wide range of items. The broadest definition would include the notion that software is the set of instructions executed by a machine. Examples of software include high-level programming languages like ALGOL and Java; operating system software like CP/M and Windows XP; application software such as PLATO and Lotus Notes. Software is essentially coded language that makes the computers do what they do.

Software was clearly in use before 1958. There was software before there were computers. If instructing a machine how to operate defines the role of software then Joseph-Marie Jocquard's loom cards qualify as software. In 1805, Jacquard used a series of cards punched with holes to instruct a loom to weave intricate patterns.

The idea to use cards punched with holes became more refined in 1890 when Herman Hollerith's Tabulating Machine Company used punched cards to tabulate the U.S. census. (Hollerith's company would eventually morph into IBM). The first electronic computer, the Atanasoff-Berry Computer emerged in 1939. The first digital computer, the Mark I appeared in 1944. ENIAC was working in 1946. UNIVAC, the first commercial computer was used to tabulate the 1950 U.S. census. Grace Murray Hopper developed the first compiler in 1952. Compiler software is used to convert source code in to machine code. In 1957 she developed the Flowmatic computer language for the UNIVAC 1 computer. (COBOL evolved from Flowmatic.) There was plenty of software before 1958.

COBOL Computer Code Computer programmers create source code which must be translated into a set of instructions understood by the computer. The translated source code is called machine code. The software that translates source code into machine code is known as a compiler or assembler. Compilers typically convert source code to assembly language which itself is converted to machine code by assemblers. Compilers, assemblers are examples of system software. System software is required to support the production or execution of application software. The use of application software is today ubiquitous in the modern business office and the modern home.

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Omegatropolis

Omegatropolis was originally founded as an academic town when Eniac College opened its doors in the 1940s. A rash of scientists and humanists were moved to the area that became Omegatropolis so that they could work in a utopian environment. The "Eniac Experiment" failed and the college closed its doors in 1957 but the town of Omegatropolis remains. Today it is primarily a retirement community for retired computer programmers and others associated with the computer industry.

Visitors to the city have one choice if they want to stay in the town. The elegant Jaquard Hotel is expensive, with its beautifully appointed suites, and well-trained disciplined staff. The Jacquard has a fine French restaurant, the Jaquard Room, but the cramped dining area makes ordering room service a better alternative.

The sport of baseball has always been popular in Omegatropolis. Eniac College had a vigorous intramural baseball league that included students, faculty and staff. The current site of Procoder Park, on Babbage Boulevard, was originally the Eniac College baseball field.

Given Omegatropolis' unique history it is not surprising that it would end up sponsoring a non-humanoid cosmic baseball team. The citizens of Omegatropolis have long had a peaceful and respectful relationship with their non-human counterparts, in this case, computing machines. The fact that the non-humanoid elements of Omegatropolis have their own Board of Governors is testament to this legacy of peaceful coexistence. In fact several members of the non-humanoid Board of Governors play for the Procoders.

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The Procoder Draft

The members of the Procoder's initial roster were not selected randomly. Initial specifications required that all Procoder pitchers be represented by programming languages. A selection representing first, second, third and fourth generation programming languages was further specified by the team creation order. The decision to include non-system software, such as application software was made after the original team specification was published but before any simulations were run. After a brief delay, to modify the original specifications to include all types of software, the first player generation simulation was run. Results from the first simulation were tabulated and analyzed and then a second simulation was conducted. This produced the final members of the initial roster.

PLATO 2005 Cosmic Player Simulation Card

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2005 Official Team Roster: Omegatropolis Procoders
http://www.cosmicbaseball.com/05opr.html
Published: March 7, 2005
PlateID: 3011