Computer-related introductions in 1968

programming language

observation that organizations design systems mirroring their communication structures (Melvin Conway, 1968)

SHRDLU is an early natural-language understanding computer program that was developed by Terry Winograd at MIT in 1968–1970. In the program, the user carries on a conversation with the computer, moving objects, naming collections and querying the state of a simplified "blocks world", essentially a virtual box filled with different blocks.

Undo is an interaction technique which is implemented in many computer programs. It erases the last change done to the document, reverting it to an older state. In some more advanced programs, such as graphic processing, undo will negate the last command done to the file being edited. With the possibility of undo, users can explore and work without fear of making mistakes, because they can easily be undone.

OCR-B is a monospace font developed in 1968 by Adrian Frutiger for Monotype by following the European Computer Manufacturer's Association standard. Its function was to facilitate the optical character recognition operations by specific electronic devices, originally for financial and bank-oriented uses. It was accepted as the world standard in 1973. It follows the ISO 1073-2:1976 (E) standard, refined in 1979 ("letterpress" design, size I). It includes all ASCII symbols, and other symbols needed in the bank environment. It is widely used for the human readable digits in UPC/EAN barcodes. It is

OCR-A is a font issued in 1966 and first implemented in 1968. A special font was needed in the early days of computer optical character recognition, when there was a need for a font that could be recognized not only by the computers of that day, but also by humans. OCR-A uses simple, thick strokes to form recognizable characters. The font is monospaced (fixed-width), with the printer required to place glyphs  cm ( inch) apart, and the reader required to accept any spacing between  cm ( inch) and  cm ( inch).

1967 IBM mainframe model with virtual memory and 32-bit addressing

ALTRAN (Algebraic Translator) is a programming language for the formal manipulation of rational functions of several variables with integer coefficients. It was developed at Bell Labs in 1960s. ALTRAN is a FORTRAN version of ALPAK rational algebra package, and “can be thought of as a variant of FORTRAN with the addition of an extra declaration, the ‘algebraic’ type declaration.”