Wow. I had a C-64 and I remember that dancing mouse program. That's a memory I hadn't touched in a while.
On Sat, Nov 13, 2010 at 9:00 PM, Stan Halpin <[email protected]> wrote: > 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. > -- Steve Desjardins -- 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.
