Part of my motivation for starting on an ALGOL project was that Brian Randell recently obtained permission from the copyright holder to post an online copy of ALGOL 60 Implementation at CHM. This book, which he and Lawford Russell published in 1964, provides a detailed description of the ALGOL 60 compiler (known as Whetstone ALGOL) they developed for the English Electric KDF9 Computer. In January, Brian gave a talk “Reminiscences of Whetstone ALGOL” at a joint meeting of the BCS Advanced Programming Group and the Computer Conservation Society recognizing the 50th anniversary of ALGOL 60; see here for more on Whetstone. In particular, the Whetstone Algol resurrection team notes: “We now have the Walgol Translator re-keyed from a dog-eared listing, in the main, by Brian Wichmann, Graham Toal and Roderick McLeod. David Holdsworth has written an assembler and a rough-and-ready emulator. Bill Findlay is in the process of implementing a properly-enginered emulator.”
Update 2010/9/22: corrected URL for Whetstone at Software Preservation Group website.
Update 2012/7/11: corrected URLs for ALGOL 60 Implementation at Software Preservation Group website and “Reminiscences of Whetstone ALGOL” at ncl.ac.uk.
Update 2020/3/10: Bill Findlay contacted me to say: “You might be interested to know that the emulator mentioned [above] is in good working order. Not only does it run the Whetstone system, it now also runs the Kidsgrove optimising compiler for KDF9 Algol as well. The latter was restored by a team including one of its original authors, David Huxtable. See: http://www.findlayw.plus.com/KDF9/.
Also corrected (again) links to ncl.ac.uk.
Update 2024/05/08: Corrected link for Brian Randell and for Whetstone Algol Resurrection.