Microsoft didn't invent SOAP!

Wow! Here I've been thinking for nearly the last 10 years that Microsoft invented SOAP. Duh.

Not only that, SOAP, it turns out, was not invented in 1999. It was actually first invented in 1953. (I'm of course not talking about soap, in which case the invention date is a few years prior to that ;-).)

I was searching for lists of programming languages to give to my programming languages class students to do papers on and I found that the IBM 650 assembly language was called Symbolic Optimal Assembly Program ... or SOAP!