-3- 
"THE ROCHESTER ULTIMATE WEAPON” 
That is what W. Simon calls a new high speed real-time inter¬ 
pretive language developed for use by biologists, and built for 
operation in a PDP-8 with 4K of memory, requiring DEC tapes. The 
language is currently available through the Division of Biomath¬ 
ematics, University of Rochester School of Medicine, 260 Critten¬ 
den Blvd, Rochester, NY 14620. Although currently only adapted 
to the PDP-8, it is expected to be functional on the PDP-12 in the 
near future. The purpose of Dr. Simon in developing the new 
language was two-fold: 
1) To increase the use of small computers by biologists 
by making it easy for them to learn the fundamentals 
of computing, 
2) To circumvent the problems of machine language use, 
which was all that had been avai1able on the PDP series 
previously. 
The technique used in the new language is explained in a short 
note in "Medical and Biological Engineering," vo1. 8, 1970, pp. 
203-205. A bench mark program took 22 seconds to run in FOCAL, 
7 secs in DEC FORTRAN, 6 secs in SNAP (another Simon language), 
and only 2 secs in the "Rochester Ultimate Weapon." —JAP. 
COMPUTERS IN BIOLOGY AND MEDICINE 
Volume 1, number 1, of a new journal with the title above 
appeared in August of 1970. As usual, when people talk about 
" biology and medicine," they are thinking of biology i_n medicine. 
There clearly isn't going to be too much here to interest the 
ecologist or systematist, although the editor writes, on p. 1, 
that "the purpose of this journal is to establish an international 
forum for the exchange of knowledge in the rapidly developing 
field of computer use in medicine and the biosciences." In a 
long list of possible subj ect matter to be covered, including 
such things as Application of Quantum Chemistry to Molecular 
Configurations or Functional-force Analysis Applied to Dental 
Prostheses and other Dental Problems (or maybe you prefer 
"Computer Aids to Morality," whatever that means), we also find 
the following MUDPIE possibilities: Taxonomy and Classification 
Methods; Information Exchange among Research Workers; Applications 
of Computers to Data Processing in the Biomedical Sciences; 
Special Purpose Computers for Data Processing; and Computer 
Programming of Pattern-recognition Analysis. I miss any refer¬ 
ence to the possibilities of inter-institution time-shared 
networks, establishment of common data banks or mutual access 
storage, and so on. A couple of papers from this first issue 
are listed below in the "Literature" section.—JAP. 
