My first languages were FORTRAN & Basic. Done via punch cards on a mainframe the school rented time on. Drop your cards (in order; with paper with your name, class, school; rubber band around package) in the outbox before the afternoon deadline. Pick up your cards & output (on green & white striped fanfold) in the morning from the inbox.
See it got six or so cards in before a lexical error, kicking your stack out. Fix error and repeat until whole stack compiled. Then you got to see your logic errors. Oh, and don't forget to number your cards, and put a diagonal stripe on the side. Makes it much easier to get them back in order when (not if) you dropped them. Those were the days. I don't miss them. Well, not much. I think we did a lot more planning on our programs before we started writing them on sheets of paper with boxes matching the punch cards. Sometimes running through the program as if we were the computer, because of the slow turnaround and the deadlines. Now you can get instant feedback in an IDE. But given the choice, I'll use today's tools. Sometimes an old dog can learn new tricks. Jeff ________________________________ From: jon.maddog.h...@gmail.com <jonhal...@comcast.net> Sent: Wednesday, May 1, 2024 7:53:01 PM To: Jeffry Smith <jsm...@alum.mit.edu>; gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org <gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org> Subject: Re: Anyone want to buy a supercomputer? My first language was FORTRAN, using punched cards on an IBM 1130 in 1969, but when I went to teach at Hartford State Technical College in 1977-1980 we used BASIC-PLUS on a DEC PDP 11/70 running RSTS/E as a time-sharing operating system. Students in those days had no computers at home, and many typically had no computer classes in high school. The first time they touched a computer keyboard was in my "Introduction to Computer Programming" class. When you first logged into your RSTS/E account you were immediately talking to the BASIC-PLUS interpreter, more or less like to talk to a shell interpreter today. READY was the output given to you. If you typed in the line without a line number, the line was executed immediately, so you could use it as a "calculator": Print 5*3 would give you "15" as an answer. If you typed in a line number at the beginning of the line it stored the command in line order: 10 Let A=3 20 Let B=5 30 Print A*B 40 END Run would give you the same answer, but the values of "A" and "B" would stay in memory as would the rest of the program. With BASIC-PLUS you did not need an editor (you could use one, but you did not NEED it). You did not have to know what a compiler was or a Linker or know how to use a fancy debugger. Students could start writing programs (albeit sometimes crappy programs) from day 1. On the other hand I taught a group of electrical technology students a course in how to write FORTRAN. I was allowed eight weeks (a summer course) instead of the traditional 13 weeks. Even I thought this was crazy, but the administration told me it had been done many times before. The administration lied. Most of the students just got past the stage of being able to edit, compile and link a simple program before the course was over. So BASIC has a lot of detractors, mostly due to the infamous "GOTO". But BASIC-PLUS also allowed you to write and call subroutines and functions. So here is to you, BASIC! You moved a lot of people forward. md On 05/01/2024 4:04 PM EDT Jeffry Smith <jsm...@alum.mit.edu> wrote: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/04/us-government-auctions-5-34-petaflop-cheyenne-supercomputer/ Useful for running your Basic programs https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/05/the-basic-programming-language-turns-60/ Jeff _______________________________________________ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
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