Marcus sed:
I wonder what life was like as a working programmer at IBM in those
days. I assume it was depressingly regimented and the real hackers who
could take something like this on were at the ivy league schools?
I've a friend in his late 70s who was a bit in that froth... he
graduated MIT around 1963 with a degree in Architecture but a hankering
and aptitude for programming (nearly failed his Architecture degree
because of all the time he spent in the computer lab)... He was
solicited by IBM to come to NMTech as the human "analyst" attached to
the IBM they had sold to Stirling Colgate who was leading that charge in
those days. Before he could actually begin his work, but had already
relocated, DEC got to Stirling and they dropped IBM for a DEC machine,
like the gentlemen duelists IBM and DEC were at the time, my friend was
"gifted" to DEC by IBM... "ah the pleasures of being chattel, or at
least an indentured servant!". He stayed with DEC until retirement,
taking a few years sabbatical to work at a startup which sold out big
enough to give him room to then singlehandedly build a PASCAL compiler
and P-Code interpreter for the pre-DOS IBM PC and even declined an offer
from Bill Gates himself for packaging it with DOS, that included
royalties... he felt it wasn't finished and besides, he didn't think
much of Gates and didn't think he was really going anywhere.
One of his more influential professors was Minsky himself... he found
him a bit "droll" as I remember.
On 6/5/17 10:31 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
I wonder what life was like as a working programmer at IBM in those
days. I assume it was depressingly regimented and the real hackers
who could take something like this on were at the ivy league schools?
*From:*Friam [mailto:[email protected]] *On Behalf Of *Barry
MacKichan
*Sent:* Monday, June 05, 2017 9:45 AM
*To:* The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
<[email protected]>
*Subject:* Re: [FRIAM] the woman behind the woman
This triggers some personal memories. I have a letter from her,
basically a rejection letter, saying I couldn’t have a summer job with
them (Boston Advanced Programming group) until I finished my second
year in college. Although I don’t remember ever hearing the name of
the project, one of the IBMers described it to me as “like Fortran,
but symbolic rather than purely numeric.” Clearly it was FORMAC.
I always assumed Jean Sammet was a (French) man, but now, 55 years
later, I see “(Miss)” written before her signature.
By the next summer, I had pretty much dropped my interest in computers
and spent the summer paddling a canoe to Hudson Bay and it took me
about 20 years to get back into software.
--Barry
On 4 Jun 2017, at 11:01, Marcus Daniels wrote:
She had the right idea about FORMAC. Only a reality now with
systems like SymPy 50 years later. But an evolved FORMAC would
have been better, as it would have been a high performance
numerics language too.
http://www.pl-enthusiast.net/2017/05/24/jean-sammet-a-remembrance/
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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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