On Friday 07 November 2003 05:42, Leo Sutic wrote: > I feel for the people who had to suffer young "hip" > COBOL coders walking around and spreading buzzwords all over > the place... :)
;o) The "really hip" people (who had a brain) was buzzing all over the place over APL (A Programming Language). More obfuscated language is hard to come by, but great in solving matrix solveable algorithms. > A lecturer at KTH told me about coding way-back-when: You turned > in your code on cards to the computer operator and had them processed. > Then, whenever the computer was finished (depending on load and other > people's jobs queued up to go), the operator would give you back a > printout of the program output. (For you real young ones - yes > that means *you* in particular - by "computer operator" I mean an > actual human being.) When I got to LTH (for non-swedish members, KTH = Royal Polytechnic Uni, LTH=Lunds Polytechnic Uni, 2 of the 3 top engineering Us there), we were instructed of those procedures. The distribution of output, however, was really neat; The top card contained stuff like user name, banner type, printer type, but also distribution center (there were something like 4-5 of them), where you would pick up the output. You could also say; By Mail, postal service that is!!! However, a great deal of time was explained on it, and I never used it beyond the "training". The on-line terminals were "too cool", and at night you could get access to vector terminals (read graphics), which had no automatic refresh, it was a manual operation to clear the screen physically, and then the program could draw a new image by vector coordinates again. > Turnaround times were fast at night when almost no one used the > computer - only about two hours. And better yet; The CPU time cost USD500 per hour on a VAX and USD 1200 on the Sperry Univac, but students didn't have to pay, just wait.... > Now back to my "Component Framework for Front Panel Switches"... I say IMSAI 8080!!!! Will your framework be useful for bootstrapping that machine? Cheers Niclas --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
