ECPRESS: a mini-IMPRESS

Two years ago, Project DELTA, a computing facility studying computational learning activity in pre-college education, became interested in Dartmouth's IMPRESS as a means of motivating computer use in social studies classes. IMPRESS is most attractive because it is interactive, and it is written in BASIC. Being interactive is important because our users are remote and prefer the time-sharing mode of computing. The project selected a PDP-11 with RSTS, because a very high level BASIC is their only time-sharing language. However, we innocently underestimated the task of adapting the larger program to a mini-computer. We met with Ed Meyers, Director of Project IMPRESS at Dartmouth, to define the scope of the task. I will describe briefly the procedures, problems, solutions, and expectations which were identified as important to achieving the objectives of creating a mini-IMPRESS. I will assume that the reader is familiar with the IMPRESS system and has some knowledge of DEC's RSTS and RSTS/E with BASIC-PLUS.