"John D. Kim" wrote:
>
> Wow, I've only heard about keypunch. My high school cs teacher used to
> tell us about it. I learned COBOL when I was in high school, but we had a
> nice VMS machine to code it on. And I thought COBOL just couldn't be any
> worse, but I guess I was wrong.
>
> On Tue, 14 Mar 2000, ibi wrote:
>
> > And, here I thought I was the only kid on the block old enough to know
> > what keypuch is! Shilly me. LOL .. Pj
Well, I coded Fortran II and Cobol on an IBM 1620 and 7040
back in 1964 using keypunches. It actually worked quite
well. Fortran II is very close to the first Microsoft
Basics (as sold by MITS for their Altair).
The 1620 was slow, with rotating memory drum; but the 7040
had hand wound core memory and it was FAST. I am not sure
that it would not favorably compete with modern micros in
term of speed. But you wouldn't want to pay the electric
and air conditioning bill! That was in the days before
integrated circuits. Each memory bit took two to four
transistors and a toroid core with three windings as I
recall.
Does this make me the old Geezer of the Mandrake List?
--
Ramon Gandia ============= Sysadmin ============== Nook Net
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