Niclas Hedhman wrote:
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....
A long time ago I did a deal with this commercial computing center - basically the deal was that I could do what I wanted beteen 9pm and 9am. I would walk in the door at about 8:45 carrying a disk pack (cylindracal disc about 40 cm in diameter and about 15 cm deep). I would go into the computer room, power-down the most advanced computing system in the country, swap disks, reboot - and start playing.
Now back to my "Component Framework for Front Panel Switches"...
I say IMSAI 8080!!!! Will your framework be useful for bootstrapping that machine?
Personal favourite is the PDP 11 - you had the lights - the little flashing signals to tell you what was happening. I could see the differnece between build versus runtime just by looking at the sequences!
I miss those days!
Steve.
Cheers Niclas
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Stephen J. McConnell mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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