That should be muscles, not seafood. Damn spell checker.
Peter J. Alling wrote:
Yep, it really built mussels and character lugging those boxes of cards around.
Paul Sorenson wrote:
1963 - Intro to Numerical Control - UW-Madison. Card punch, card reader,
IBM 1620 (50K housed in two boxes each the size of your dining room table),
no tape drives, all punch card output. Programmed in ForGo, a combination
or Fortran and Gotran. Stand in line waiting for your job to run, run the
cards through the card reader/printer and get *Program not accepted, line
xx, line xx*, search for/correct the syntax error, re-punch the cards and
run the whole process again.
Aahh, those were the days of *manly* computing. <g>
Paul ----- Original Message ----- From: "John Francis" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Tuesday, November 16, 2004 11:17 PM Subject: Re: Home Computer Prediction From 1954
William Robb mused:
When I was in grade 8, which would have been 1970, I guess, the
university installed a punch card terminal in my high school and all
of a sudden, we had a computer science program.
We did our little programs in basic, and the bundles of cards were
sent off to be run through the computer. The next day, we got back
tractor feed sheets of our work.
Grade 9 we graduated to Fortran.
Beat you by around five years; I got to use a Stantec Zebra on a summer "Numerical Methods, Statistics & Computing" course.
We didn't use no wimpy high-level languages - programming was in autocode. It's amazing what you can do if nobody tells you that it's supposed to be difficult :-)
By 1970 I was using an Atlas and a 360/44, amongst other systems.
--
I can understand why mankind hasn't given up war. During a war you get to drive tanks through the sides of buildings and shoot foreigners - two things that are usually frowned on during peacetime.
--P.J. O'Rourke
