My first "programming" task was on an IBM 402 using a plug board (http://www.columbia.edu/acis/history/402.html). Do click the link to the Control Panel. When I was an undergraduate, a professor hired me to run the statistics on a research project he was doing for Xerox; this involved transcribing the data to punch cards, programming and running the 402 to get basic descriptive stats, then spending hours on a Smith Marchant calculator doing the more complicated statistics. (I always wondered whether the hours I put in were reimbursed to him at his rate or at mine.) I soon graduated to JCL on the IBM 701, then took Fortran as one of my two required foreign languages in grad school. (Really! My major professor and department chair both thought it a splendid idea.) And used the Fortran to execute and then analyze data from my experiments. In my early professional years my organization had a CDC 3300 with expanded memory and a custom operating system that allowed "dual processing" of a sort. I wrote code for the background processes which managed the I/O on a bank of CRT's - my research subject's responded to cues presented on the screen, the program recorded their answers and the timing, and branched according to their answers. Debugging those programs (a frequent occurrence) involved doing a core dump and then tracing the status of various processes by reading the hexadecimal printout. My first laptop (from the office, not my own) was an Osborne 1. My own first computer was a Commodore 64 but I soon moved on to a Mac+ and have stuck with Macs since then. Much exposure to IBM's, Compaqs, Dells, and their ilk at the office as well as more exotic Symbolics LISP machines etc. Ho hum. But I do regret not keeping the C-64 and the tape deck used for external storage and the Basic program which produced a dancing mouse on the screen . . .
stan On Nov 13, 2010, at 1:32 PM, John Francis wrote: > On Sat, Nov 13, 2010 at 01:21:46PM -0500, David J Brooks wrote: >> On Sat, Nov 13, 2010 at 10:48 AM, John Mullan <[email protected]> wrote: >>> My first language to code in was Fortran. >> >> Same here. Took it in College in 1972. I'm pretty sure i failed it as >> the teacher and I ad a major blow out one day, i I left the class. > > Back when I started you programmed machines mostly in assembler (or, if > you were lucky, autocode of some kind). High-level languages did exist, > but weren't very common. > > The first machines I saw that was mostly programmed in anything other > than low-level code were the TSS/8 system, programmed in Focal, and an > IBM 1130 in the engineering department, which had FORTRAN II. > -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
