This is taking me down a memory lane I don't necessarily have but have
heard about! Ah, the early days of computers!
On 07/23/2018 05:14 AM, Erik Christiansen wrote:
On 23.07.18 10:28, Eric S Fraga wrote:
On Sunday, 22 Jul 2018 at 05:39, Tom Browder wrote:
Sounds like there are a lot of fellow travelers here. If you lean
more towards loving programming as I do (started in FORTRAN IV in
1961), you might check out the new world of Perl 6 (https://perl6.org)
Interesting. I started way back when with FORTRAN 66 and APL but I have
moved on to Julia (julialang.org) these days.
In 1972 we were still submitting FORTRAN IV jobs on Hollerith punched
cards, to run on an ICL1901 24-bit mainframe, which half-filled a room
with its fridge-sized chain printer and big card reader and disk drives.
But the electrical engineering department had its own little HP2100A
16-bit minicomputer, with 16k words of 980 ns ferrite core memory. (Very
spiffy stuff, back then.) If you overwrote the punched tape bootloader
in the first dozen words or so of RAM, then you had to load it by hand
from the frontpanel switch register, word by word, in octal.
The three-chip 8080A CPU had become the single-chip 8085 by the time I
programmed it, before moving to the 8051 microcontroller, but sprinkling
13 of 'em in a system, 12 mask programmed, so no coding errors permitted,
My first home CPU was a TMS9900, which like the COSMAC had 16 x 16 bit
registers, but not on-chip. A pointer register set the location of the
register workspace in RAM, so that on interrupt or subroutine call,
changing one register gave a new set of registers instantly. It also had
a barrel shifter, rotating a register any number of bits in a single
instruction, optionally controlled by the 4 LSBs of R0. (Magic for
computing sine and cos by the CORDIC method.) And it had 16x16 multiply
and 32/16 divide.
But the contemporary COSMAC was well ahead of its time - a CMOS CPU in 1976.
Erik
This sounds a lot like a friend of mine who is much older than me, who
used punch cards. Luckily I was a teen in the dawn of the
microscomputing age. It was mostly cassette tape and for the rich and
well off, the 5.25" floppy disk drive. I never encountered punch cards.
I bet it was a PITA compared to today.
This also reminds me of the old days of assembly language programming on
the CoCo 3 (68B09E CPU) using disk EDASAM+ I actually did a good bit of
that (pun half intended).
Never learned x86 assembly.
I'm going to start another thread (much more on Debian topic I hope)
about assemblers, as I'm curious about that too.
I guess I get curious about everything. See what you guys started? :P
