Off to https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/alt.folklore.computers with you.
I wrote my first program slightly under 50 years ago.
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Steam Computing
- Thread starter aw1
- Start date
Off to https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/alt.folklore.computers with you.
I wrote my first program slightly under 50 years ago.
Black Hole
May contain traces of nut
I'll say 46 years ago, in BASIC over a teletype connection to a remote mainframe.
Fortran. On an IBM 1130. Got so addicted that I bought my own disk pack. Also so addicted that I failed to get an honours pass in my 1st year engineering exams and was ejected by my college.
My first program was 54 years ago in Algol using a teletype to produce punched tape.
Black Hole
May contain traces of nut
I also tried running a program on the local college mini (FORTRAN from punched cards), and it wouldn't load because the data set exceeded the size of the core store.
Black Hole
May contain traces of nut
Never heard of that.
Ugh! It looks like a Frankenstein patchwork of high-level IO with assembly-level op codes. My first reaction was... "why?".
prpr
Well-Known Member
I expect somebody, somewhere, thought it was a good idea at the time. You know what they say about teachers...
Background: http://iclces.uk/index.html
Somebody recreated it so you can have a play on a modern computer: http://www.obelisk.me.uk/cesil/
This (or very similar) is what we ran it on back then:
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MymsMan
Ad detector
I think it is 49-50 years when I started with CESIL at school but fairly soon moved on to Algol on paper tape which we took to a local technical college to run on an already obsolete computer (the compiler also had to be loaded from paper tape - they had no magnetic tape drives) and output was also to paper tape.
We also had a teletype dialup (acoustic coupler) to a service bureau running a Basic like language.
Probably time to split this thread out
Black Hole
May contain traces of nut
july noted.
54 years ago using assembler on an IBM 1440 with 8k chars (6 bits) memory and 2 x 2M chars disc drives. The machine code program was produced on punched cards which
you could patch with chaff from the hand punch machine to avoid re-assembling. This was frowned upon as the chaff could fall out from the punch card at some time in the future!!
you could patch with chaff from the hand punch machine to avoid re-assembling. This was frowned upon as the chaff could fall out from the punch card at some time in the future!!
prpr
Well-Known Member
May I join in this fun?
Ezra Pound
Well-Known Member
For me it was PL/M in the early 1970s, a teletype connected via a telephone handset wedged into a audio coupler 'on-line' to a local mainframe, later our own PDP11 working on intel 8008 and 8080. I still have my 1977 copy of Illustrating Basic by Donald Alcock - happy days
mike_m
Active Member
I guess I came in late... I had another career at the time (graphic designer), and got hooked when a friend showed me Colossal Caves on an Exidy Sorcerer (1979-ish think). So I took a night-school course in BASIC at Middlesex Poly (as it was then) where I experienced the joys of programming on teletype terminals - then quit my job and joined a start-up company in the brand-new business of computer animation. By 1984 I was working in C on a VAX - which cost £100,000 second-hand, needed its own air-conditioning system, but had less cpu power and memory than my phone has today.
prpr
Well-Known Member
I so wanted one of those as a kid. We ended up getting a Beeb micro.
Same at Trent Poly in my case, initially on ASR33s, then they got some VDUs. I found the 'secret' 110/300 switch on the back (which was set to 110, except when I was using it
).
mike_m
Active Member
Me too - I waited many months for delivery after ordering it, I remember - it was a Model A, 16k RAM, serial No. 883 !
EEPhil
Number 28
Late to the party. Probably FORTRAN 40 years ago, punched card to ICL 1900.
I remember doing that approximately 35 years ago from a consultancy company that used Apple II as a dumb terminal to connect to the very expensive mainframe service at the university. 300 baud as well. Combine the connection with run times and time to go for a three-course meal between keypresses.
I remember doing that approximately 35 years ago from a consultancy company that used Apple II as a dumb terminal to connect to the very expensive mainframe service at the university. 300 baud as well. Combine the connection with run times and time to go for a three-course meal between keypresses.In my case 1987, Fortran/Pascal and a little C on a microVax (new) ~£35k IIRC(Might be mixing it up with VaxStation II or a 3100 that were added later) . No air-con needed. Serious work done on it could take a month to run! This ancient laptop does same job in less than an hour.
Ah, those were the days, when Nottingham Trent University knew its place. I still call it Trent Poly. (For some reason, I'd entered it into the VAX network database as NOTTS.POLY. Maybe I got that from the computer centre. Blagged a lot of configuration from them)
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EEPhil
Number 28
I remember ICL 2900s that had that problem. 2Mb data unless you placed some data in a common area (ie. the FORTRAN COMMON statement - even without any subroutines or functions) and then you could get a whole 16Mb. And that was virtual storage. So you had to be careful of thrashing.