Assembler vs machine code. I remember being at a meeting with some of the Pok hardware people, and was told the people responsible for coding the microcode for the Load instructions, sit right across the hall from the people who code the Store instructions. Quote*: Great fleas have little fleas* upon their backs to bite 'em, And little fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum.
On Thu, 2 Jan 2025 at 17:04, Phil Smith III <[email protected]> wrote: > This thread has not disappointed. Lots of good history. > > Re Autocoder: My dad was hired by OGA (Other Government Agency, aka CIA) > in the 50s, as he was working on his PhD in Slavic linguistics, to work on > their machine translation project. He would describe to a programmer what > he wanted a program to do; the programmer would write it out on Autocoder > sheets; a keypunch operator would input it; and a day or two later, he'd > find out what it did. He figured out that if he learned to program, he > could shorten that cycle time, so he did. Which led to another machine > translation project at IBM Yorktown. Neither was successful. > > He subsequently wound up in academia but continued to freelance for the > government doing translations, typically of obscure Slavic languages for > which they didn't have any resident experts. This led to a fun incident in > high school where my sister's class was asked to see if they had a > dictionary in the house; she reported that she'd found 42. And was accused > of lying. Which got the teacher a visit from my dad, who was cheerful but > direct about it, and who noted that this list included the Polish-Russian > Technical Dictionary, which included not a word of English... > > I wish he'd lived long enough to see Google Translate, which, while not > perfect, is pretty impressive--and which, when backed by someone fluent, is > surely able to improve translation times of critical documents by an order > of magnitude or two. > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, > send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
