[pjmlp]

There was no Internet and knowledge was shared via magazines and computer clubs.

Forth was quite popular in Europe thanks to Jupiter Ace and ZX Spectrum extensions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jupiter_Ace

http://www.worldofspectrum.org/infoseekid.cgi?id=0008717

[qwertyuiop924]

That's true. And APL and its children is still quite popular in finance.

By the way, I found a rather neat page about building a Jupiter ACE: http://searle.hostei.com/grant/JupiterAce/JupiterAce.html

[mhd]

Mentioning APL in this context makes me picture an 8 bit home computer with an APL interpreter. I mean, the C64 had all kinds of weird symbols on its keyboard, too. And the magazines would save quite some pages for their source code listing compared to BASIC...

[qwertyuiop924]

According to Wikipedia, the first implementation of APL on a micro was on the 8008, in '73. It wasn't very good, but it did run...

Later ('77), TIS APL ran on Z80 systems, and was aparently quite a bit better, although it wasn't a full implementation.

But I'm just quoting Wikipedia at this point, so look it up yourself.