Blast from the past (re: Fred Brooks)

[DoctorStrangelove]

Youngsters, my first attempt at programming was toggling the code in on the front panel of a PDP8 and the next experience was punching holes in paper tape My dad got into programming in the early 50's as a civil servant when they came round asking for people to be programmers (no experience necessary) for the new computer thingy that was the size of a house for the DHSS He got membership of the BCS just for being a programmer in those early days.

I remember Algol, Fortran and the early days of C and writing programs in Fortran then taking the assembler output and optimising it to improve performance Nowadays its Java all the way for me

The first machine I encountered in 1972 was the Modular One computer* in the Electrical Engineering dept at Loughborough.

It had 4k of core**, and was programmed in FORTRAN IV using paper tape via an ASR33.

It even had a VDU: not a data input device but rather a display terminal for graphs & such like, with, I think, a bistable screen so the trace didn't fade (so quickly).

No disks so everything was loaded using the paper tape reader.

A compile took rather a long time: load the FORTRAN compiler, read the source, find errors, read the source, punch the object, load the linker, read the object, punch the exe, run the exe & watch it die horribly.

Them were the days.


*There's not much on the Modular One on the interweb and nothing I've ever found about the one in Loughborough.

**Spent my "career" programming machines of that size, the difference being they've shrunk from something taking kW and a whole room to something with 18 legs that takes mW and sits in magnificent isolation on a PCB.

Yes, didn't Borland threaten to sue them or something, so they changed their name to Zortech.

Yup. That was it. IIRC Walter Bright was the author of the compiler.

Indeed: https://www.red-gate.com/simple-talk...k-of-the-week/

[Lockhouse]

In my day we wrote COBOL in pencil on coding sheets that went away to be punched at a bureau. Then we were only allowed one compile a day. Kids today eh?

[NickFitz]

Youngsters, my first attempt at programming was toggling the code in on the front panel of a PDP8 and the next experience was punching holes in paper tape My dad got into programming in the early 50's as a civil servant when they came round asking for people to be programmers (no experience necessary) for the new computer thingy that was the size of a house for the DHSS He got membership of the BCS just for being a programmer in those early days.

I remember Algol, Fortran and the early days of C and writing programs in Fortran then taking the assembler output and optimising it to improve performance Nowadays its Java all the way for me

We had a PDP-8/e at school, which we were allowed to use in our own time after demonstrating a sufficient level of competence. I quite often used to go and spend a few hours a day in the computer room during the school holidays. If you were the first one in there, you had to toggle in the bootstrap code for the high-speed punch tape reader using the toggle switches on the front to get it started

[SueEllen]

In my day we wrote COBOL in pencil on coding sheets that went away to be punched at a bureau. Then we were only allowed one compile a day. Kids today eh?

compilation?

Try an interpreted language....

[NigelJK]

Like say BBCBasic?
Now the interpreter sits in the CPU cache, along with the program if you use RISCOS.