First Programs
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I remember a long, long time ago writing programs out, longhand, on paper just for the fun of it - this was 2 or 3 years before I even had access to a computer, taught myself basic, fortran and cobol by reading books at the library (books! Remember them?). As an apprentice I remember an old SBC from a machine tool at work, state of the art it was at the time (68000 I think), I programmed it hex byte by hex byte on the bench to sequence a row of LEDs in a flashy pattern, how amazing was that at the time! Best of all when the company had it's first network with UNIX workstations and figuring out I could send a page full of CTRL-G's to my buddy in the next office and the look on his face as he hammered on the keyboard to try and stop it beeping, with the boss howling at him to shut it... Anyone else remember the good old days?
Yes. Which is why I have a small collection of OpenVMS sytems here.
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I remember a long, long time ago writing programs out, longhand, on paper just for the fun of it - this was 2 or 3 years before I even had access to a computer, taught myself basic, fortran and cobol by reading books at the library (books! Remember them?). As an apprentice I remember an old SBC from a machine tool at work, state of the art it was at the time (68000 I think), I programmed it hex byte by hex byte on the bench to sequence a row of LEDs in a flashy pattern, how amazing was that at the time! Best of all when the company had it's first network with UNIX workstations and figuring out I could send a page full of CTRL-G's to my buddy in the next office and the look on his face as he hammered on the keyboard to try and stop it beeping, with the boss howling at him to shut it... Anyone else remember the good old days?
Repeat after me: Feed . . . register . . . release. Feed . . . register . . . release. Feed . . . register . . . release. Feed . . . register . . . release.
"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein
"If you are searching for perfection in others, then you seek disappointment. If you are seek perfection in yourself, then you will find failure." - Balboos HaGadol Mar 2010
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The first time I programmed a computer was at university - an ICL running George 3 - and we programmed on punched cards. Unfortunately, there were about 6 punch machines (a huge box with a keyboard that made physical holes in the card, and printed the character at the top so you could read it) and several hundred students to use them. They broke - a lot - the ran out of printing tape all the time, and the queues were immense! You could use coding sheets and submit them to "the punch ladies" who would do them for you, but the turnround time was in days, not hours, and they typed what they saw, not what you wrote (which is why I "bar" my zeros and sevens to this day:
*** *****
* ** *
* * * ***
** * *
*** *So I soon learnt to read holes myself, and to use a hand punch where you pushed the pins through the card to make the letter columns. Then you put a rubber band round your cards, and submitted them to the Computer Operators for computer processing - which took about 8 hours on average to get a printout of your compiler errors. And the operators hated students - heck they hated everybody! They would drop the cards, shuffle them, add a few from the next pack, add a little lettuce and mayo (no, seriously - one of my desk can back with half a sandwich in the middle). So the whole process began again. Things have moved on: next time you complain about a VS compilation taking too long, remember that a edit-compile-run session when I started was probably a whole day...to get told you missed a double quote and it couldn't run!
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
SNAP! BTDTGTTS The good old days 8)
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I remember a long, long time ago writing programs out, longhand, on paper just for the fun of it - this was 2 or 3 years before I even had access to a computer, taught myself basic, fortran and cobol by reading books at the library (books! Remember them?). As an apprentice I remember an old SBC from a machine tool at work, state of the art it was at the time (68000 I think), I programmed it hex byte by hex byte on the bench to sequence a row of LEDs in a flashy pattern, how amazing was that at the time! Best of all when the company had it's first network with UNIX workstations and figuring out I could send a page full of CTRL-G's to my buddy in the next office and the look on his face as he hammered on the keyboard to try and stop it beeping, with the boss howling at him to shut it... Anyone else remember the good old days?
Yeah I remember typing programs from magazines into my ZX Spectrum. They never ever worked and I was always left scratching my head. My first program on the ZX Spectrum was a D&D character generator. Had I the wit to sell it, or port it to another platform, I could have made a bit of money out of it. Always thought I was going to write my own game. Forty years on, having worked as a software developer in more companies, projects and technologies than I dare to remember, I'm still chasing that dream.
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Repeat after me: Feed . . . register . . . release. Feed . . . register . . . release. Feed . . . register . . . release. Feed . . . register . . . release.
"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein
"If you are searching for perfection in others, then you seek disappointment. If you are seek perfection in yourself, then you will find failure." - Balboos HaGadol Mar 2010
Reminds me of my favorite class in college: CEG 431, Introduction to Concurrent Programming. Labs were on PDP-11/05's, programmed in PDP-11 assembly language. The machines had a board with magnetic core memory containing the bootstrap for the O/S. The bootstrap was 80 words. Unfortunately, if your program got out of hand, it could wipe the core. You then had to fat-finger the bootstrap in through the front panel switches: [^] I had to do that once or twice. One guy in our class got so good at it, he could re-enter the bootstrap in under 60 seconds. Of course, that doesn't say much for the quality of his code, that he needed to acquire that skill :rolleyes: .
Software Zen:
delete this; -
The first time I programmed a computer was at university - an ICL running George 3 - and we programmed on punched cards. Unfortunately, there were about 6 punch machines (a huge box with a keyboard that made physical holes in the card, and printed the character at the top so you could read it) and several hundred students to use them. They broke - a lot - the ran out of printing tape all the time, and the queues were immense! You could use coding sheets and submit them to "the punch ladies" who would do them for you, but the turnround time was in days, not hours, and they typed what they saw, not what you wrote (which is why I "bar" my zeros and sevens to this day:
*** *****
* ** *
* * * ***
** * *
*** *So I soon learnt to read holes myself, and to use a hand punch where you pushed the pins through the card to make the letter columns. Then you put a rubber band round your cards, and submitted them to the Computer Operators for computer processing - which took about 8 hours on average to get a printout of your compiler errors. And the operators hated students - heck they hated everybody! They would drop the cards, shuffle them, add a few from the next pack, add a little lettuce and mayo (no, seriously - one of my desk can back with half a sandwich in the middle). So the whole process began again. Things have moved on: next time you complain about a VS compilation taking too long, remember that a edit-compile-run session when I started was probably a whole day...to get told you missed a double quote and it couldn't run!
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
And you had to put those JCL cards on top which generally I got wrong and after several hours waiting for the print out all I got was some incomprehensible error code in hex.
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And you had to put those JCL cards on top which generally I got wrong and after several hours waiting for the print out all I got was some incomprehensible error code in hex.
I'd forgotten those! :laugh:
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
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I remember a long, long time ago writing programs out, longhand, on paper just for the fun of it - this was 2 or 3 years before I even had access to a computer, taught myself basic, fortran and cobol by reading books at the library (books! Remember them?). As an apprentice I remember an old SBC from a machine tool at work, state of the art it was at the time (68000 I think), I programmed it hex byte by hex byte on the bench to sequence a row of LEDs in a flashy pattern, how amazing was that at the time! Best of all when the company had it's first network with UNIX workstations and figuring out I could send a page full of CTRL-G's to my buddy in the next office and the look on his face as he hammered on the keyboard to try and stop it beeping, with the boss howling at him to shut it... Anyone else remember the good old days?
Same. I was being paid to write software to run bowling leagues, and I did not own, nor could i afford the $5000 IBM PC/XT (with dual floppies). I wrote the code out on paper, and usually rewrote it. I did not have a car, so this great lady would pick me up, and drive me to and fro on the weekend to work on her computer. When it worked, she paid me, and THEN loaned me the money to buy a Radio Shack XT Clone. Along the way, on the old PDP-11, i Learned to make the tapes BOOTABLE, changed the "Non-System disk" error message to insult the High School senior (Mark Valade) who constantly put to disks in the wrong drives, LOL. Oh, and I wrote a program to read the type ahead buffer off of the paper terminals, so I could watch what certain people were typing. It brought the entire system to its knees, LOL. It was SO Amazing, and so new... I was spending up to 12hrs a day in the High School computer room, lights off until the janitors would kick me out because they were turning on the alarms! My favorite was this amazingly cute young lady at my first job (CRT days)... I wrote a little program that would send a terminal "diag" code, her screen would blip around, she would come get me to look at it (and I had to sit next to her chatting, while she worked, and we waited for it to happen again, LOL). Of course, I stopped the program the instant she came into my office, so I was NEVER able to find the cause. But I got to know her. We actually became good friends. And I NEVER told her! I hope she is doing well... PS: To this day, I like to rewrite my code at least once after getting it to work! Two rewrites yields very solid code that rarely breaks.
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I remember a long, long time ago writing programs out, longhand, on paper just for the fun of it - this was 2 or 3 years before I even had access to a computer, taught myself basic, fortran and cobol by reading books at the library (books! Remember them?). As an apprentice I remember an old SBC from a machine tool at work, state of the art it was at the time (68000 I think), I programmed it hex byte by hex byte on the bench to sequence a row of LEDs in a flashy pattern, how amazing was that at the time! Best of all when the company had it's first network with UNIX workstations and figuring out I could send a page full of CTRL-G's to my buddy in the next office and the look on his face as he hammered on the keyboard to try and stop it beeping, with the boss howling at him to shut it... Anyone else remember the good old days?
Wrote a Vax Basic app that cycled 4 LEDs on the VT100 keyboard. Slowed everyone to a crawl. Figured out how to access memory on PETs. Changed pointers in my source code so it read 10 REM 10000 END but ran everything in between.
My apologies for the previous sig block. It's been ages since I posted anything on here.
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I remember a long, long time ago writing programs out, longhand, on paper just for the fun of it - this was 2 or 3 years before I even had access to a computer, taught myself basic, fortran and cobol by reading books at the library (books! Remember them?). As an apprentice I remember an old SBC from a machine tool at work, state of the art it was at the time (68000 I think), I programmed it hex byte by hex byte on the bench to sequence a row of LEDs in a flashy pattern, how amazing was that at the time! Best of all when the company had it's first network with UNIX workstations and figuring out I could send a page full of CTRL-G's to my buddy in the next office and the look on his face as he hammered on the keyboard to try and stop it beeping, with the boss howling at him to shut it... Anyone else remember the good old days?
My first program was on IBM 402 tabulating machines in late 60's. Several years later, after a couple of promotions, I wrote drivers for mag tape drives in assembly language. I can't begin to imagine what technology 50 years from now will be.
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The first time I programmed a computer was at university - an ICL running George 3 - and we programmed on punched cards. Unfortunately, there were about 6 punch machines (a huge box with a keyboard that made physical holes in the card, and printed the character at the top so you could read it) and several hundred students to use them. They broke - a lot - the ran out of printing tape all the time, and the queues were immense! You could use coding sheets and submit them to "the punch ladies" who would do them for you, but the turnround time was in days, not hours, and they typed what they saw, not what you wrote (which is why I "bar" my zeros and sevens to this day:
*** *****
* ** *
* * * ***
** * *
*** *So I soon learnt to read holes myself, and to use a hand punch where you pushed the pins through the card to make the letter columns. Then you put a rubber band round your cards, and submitted them to the Computer Operators for computer processing - which took about 8 hours on average to get a printout of your compiler errors. And the operators hated students - heck they hated everybody! They would drop the cards, shuffle them, add a few from the next pack, add a little lettuce and mayo (no, seriously - one of my desk can back with half a sandwich in the middle). So the whole process began again. Things have moved on: next time you complain about a VS compilation taking too long, remember that a edit-compile-run session when I started was probably a whole day...to get told you missed a double quote and it couldn't run!
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
"Edit, compile + run was probably a whole day"... Nope, we had to hand-punch the cards then send them off by post to Newcastle University. They sat there for a few days before being processed (or dropped, ripped, folded then processed) and the output would then be sent back by post. Could easily take 10 days to discover you'd punched a character in the wrong column. This was at school and a program in Elliot 903 machine code to do long division took us a whole term to debug. But we certainly learnt to be desk-check the logic + syntax and to check those holes! :-D 1970.
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I remember a long, long time ago writing programs out, longhand, on paper just for the fun of it - this was 2 or 3 years before I even had access to a computer, taught myself basic, fortran and cobol by reading books at the library (books! Remember them?). As an apprentice I remember an old SBC from a machine tool at work, state of the art it was at the time (68000 I think), I programmed it hex byte by hex byte on the bench to sequence a row of LEDs in a flashy pattern, how amazing was that at the time! Best of all when the company had it's first network with UNIX workstations and figuring out I could send a page full of CTRL-G's to my buddy in the next office and the look on his face as he hammered on the keyboard to try and stop it beeping, with the boss howling at him to shut it... Anyone else remember the good old days?
found the Apple IIe's basic interpreter in typing class in 7th grade and learned just enough to play pranks on the entire lab for an afternoon. I was hooked from there, and wanted to know more even after getting sent to the principles office. good times :-D
