On 12/13/05, Wing D Lizard <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > One of my first paid jobs was converting some surveying > trig algorithms from hp 25 rpn to a trs80 ( basic -- level 2!!).
Well, Mr. Woodbury probably has us all beat, but... My first computer experience was sometime late in the 1950s when I visited my Dad who worked for IBM down at 590 Madison Avenue on Manhattan. I got a tour of the computer room. I can't remember what the machine was, probably either a 7000 or 1400 series, but I got to mount a magnetic tape. Other early "computer" experiences were an attempt to build a computer which would compose music for a science fair project in the early '60s. This was using an educational computer which used rotary switches made up of masonite disks on a masonite panel, with nuts and bolts and wires, to make up a logic circuit. I also remember another plastic educational "computer" which consisted of a few mechanical flip-flops which you programmed by putting little short plastic soda straw pieces on pegs so that they interacted with metal rods the "clock" cycled. The clock was a plastic slide which you moved back and forth by hand. This allowed you to make sophisticated things like a counter with a small number of bits. My real computer experience started when I went to college (UConn) in 1970. At the time, I was a big electronic music fan due to a program in my high school, and majored in EE with the intent of becoming the next Robert Moog. All freshmen engineers at the time had to take an introductory Civil Engineering class which was half a semester of engineering graphics (drafting with real T-squares, triangles, and french curves) and half a semester of Fortran II programming on an IBM 1620. That got me hooked, and I started being one of the guys who haunted the university computer center. I somehow arranged to get an account on the IBM/360 Mod 65 and started learning every programming language I could. I learned PL/I by myself, and then in a class which used PL/C. On the 1620 some of us started to design a new language called SCRUBOL (which IIRC stood for Scientifically Compatible, Relatively Unusual, Basic Operating Language) the details of which are lost to the mists of time. I also picked up Lisp 1.5, Snobol, Formac, APL/360 and probably others I've since forgotten. Most of the interaction with the computer center's machines was batch jobs submitted on punched cards, but the S/360 did run an early timesharing extension to OS/360 MVT called CPS (for Conversational Programming System) which used IBM 2741 and IBM 2260 terminals. For the youngsters who wouldn't know and the senile who've forgotten, the 2741 was IBM's equivalent to a teletype but using a selectric typewriter mechanism and talking EBCDIC instead of ASCII, and the 2260 was an early CRT terminal which used delay line memory in the central terminal controller. UConn was one of the first universities with an accredited undergraduate CompSci degree due to the efforts of Taylor Booth, who was the CompSci chairman there at the time and very active in CompSci accreditation committees. Most of the comp sci courses used DEC machines owned by the EE department. So I learned PDP-5 and PDP-8 assembler language, and played around a bit with the PDP-11. I also got to play around with Algol-60 a bit with a friend who worked on a Data General Nova for the Psych department in a research assistant position. Of course, having become a language lover, I took a compiler course, but this was back in the days before yacc and lex (bison and flex to the gnus) or even the Dragon book. We used the text Compiler Construction by David Gries which was the state of the art textbook at the time. We used a compiler-compiler called Jossle which had been the PhD dissertation of the professor John White, who later became the manager of Xerox Parc and former President and now CEO of the ACM. The LR and LALR parsing algorithms were beyond the state of the art back then. But when I got to IBM one of my garage projects was to get Wilf Lalonde's LALR parser generator working on VM/CMS. I finally met Wilf some years later when I became heavily involved in the Smalltalk and OOPSLA communities. During my college days, and later when I went to work for IBM in 1974, there was a perceived and real gulf between the IBM and non-IBM computing cultures. Looking back on it now there were really as many similarities than differences. The same things were happening with somewhat different technology. VM/370 and CMS provided the infrastructure within IBM for the same uses of Unix elsewhere. We had our own email system, news groups (we called them fora) etc. The fora were wide ranging albeit more focussed on technical subjects than usenet ( I can't recall the equivalent of alt.pyrotechnics) and blossomed when the IBM PC was introduced. Gradually the gates to the outside opened up. At first you needed special approval to get an external internet email address which was via a gateway to the VM mail system. I particularly remember one internal forum which started when Byte magazine published a special issue on the history of computers, this led to a new forum called byteyymm where yymm was the year and month of that issue which contained all kinds of reminiscences like the ones on this and related threads. Of course human nature being what it is, such reminiscences tend to crop up in all kinds of discussions. We used to have a saying that all fora ultimately turned into byteyymm. I guess that this rule applies to the trilug mailing list as well! <G> -- Rick DeNatale Visit the Project Mercury Wiki Site http://www.mercuryspacecraft.com/ -- TriLUG mailing list : http://www.trilug.org/mailman/listinfo/trilug TriLUG Organizational FAQ : http://trilug.org/faq/ TriLUG Member Services FAQ : http://members.trilug.org/services_faq/
