> From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of > Daniel J. Matyola > > Yes, I also worked with computers that had punch cards in the 1960s. > Dull Boring work. > > As I result, I lost my chance to get in on the ground floor. My four > math courses in college were with John Kemeny, then head of the Math > Department, and later President, of Dartmouth College. He told us he > was working on a computer programing language, and was seeking student > volunteers. Our response was that we didn't want to get involved with > computers that gave you paper cuts, and anyway, we had our slide rules; > who needed computers? Kemeny went on to develop BASIC, which was (and > perhaps still is) patented by the college. It took 20 years before I > finally became involved with computers; by that time, BASIC had gone > through numerous iterations and improvements. >
you haven't missed much. I learnt Basic on my first programming course, alongside Cobol and Pascal, in about 1981. I recently had to write an Excel VBA macro at work, having not done any real programming (ie used in a professional environment, subject to change control and all the usual programming-in-the-large considerations) for many years, and it really is very, very similar to the various primitive forms of BASIC I've used in various workplaces over the years. There is something knocking around called True BASIC <http://www.truebasic.com/>, which purports to be a sort of fundamentalist's BASIC, stripped of the barnacles it has acquired over the years. I'm not a fan of BASIC. It's one of those things that amateurs think is easy to do until they shoot themselves metaphorically in the head. A disciplined professional programmer can make it work well enough, but even the best of us make mistakes and it's too easy for them to slip through BASIC's rather feeble defences. B > Dan Matyola > http://www.pentaxphotogallery.com/danieljmatyola > > > On Aug 25, 2012, at 20:10 , John Sessoms wrote: > > > >> From: "Daniel J. Matyola" > >> > >>> My first computer was an Apple ][. Great computer. I loved it. I > >>> learned Basic, Pascal, Assembler and even a bit of machine language > >>> programing on it. It certainly wasn't "plug -and-play," but it was > >>> designed for computer hobbyists, and most of them loved it. > >>> > >>> Dan Matyola > >> > >> My "first" computer was an IBM System 360. I learned to place the > cards in the card reader "Face down & nine edge first, AND DON'T TOUCH > ANYTHING ELSE KID!" > > -- > 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. -- 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.
