..and if you tell that to the young people today, they won't believe you...
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Quote:
I won't mention the compulsory flowchart requirements... oops, just did.
I go back to the 60's. I remember a human factors course I took in the mid 70's. The professor said they had done an experiment to test flow charters versus non flow charters. Seems the flow charters got their program running with fewer compiles but the non flow charters made friends with the mainframe operators and got more runs. Time came out about the same. I still have my plastic template around here somewhere. Same drawer with my slide rule :)
If you can keep your head while those about you are losing theirs, perhaps you don't understand the situation.
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My first IT job was as a Trainee Programmer, working on an ICL 1901, with 16K, (words), of memory and no hard disk. All data processing was done via mag tape. Programs (COBOL & Plan Assembler) were hand-written on coding sheets and punched on to paper tape, by the punch & verify team. Your program was compiled overnight, by the operators, and in the morning you arrived in fear of the missing full-stop, that generated dozens, (sometimes hundreds) of compile errors. There was no Development, Test or UAT systems. Just Production. These days, I tweak a few lines of code; build/compile; unit test; repeat. Sometimes dozens of times for the same routine - because I can't be @rsed to think through how the whole program should work. And then I have the 'safety nets' of Code Review, QA and UAT. Who'd have thought 40 years ago, I'd be sitting here today with my own computer (with a screen!) gradually honing my code until I manage to get something close to working. Back then I'd have been happy to have a sharp pencil. In those days, you had to be disciplined and you had to get everything right. The young people of today... The Four Yorkshiremen Sketch - YouTube[^]
5teveH wrote:
Sounds just like this forum, albeit hilarious.
"One man's wage rise is another man's price increase." - Harold Wilson
"Fireproof doesn't mean the fire will never come. It means when the fire comes that you will be able to withstand it." - Michael Simmons
"You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him." - James D. Miles
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I started as an operator on a LEO III - 16k words of memory, card and paper tape input (and output), and magnetic tape for speed. One of the best features of the LEO was the radix register which allowed it to do calculations in LSD. Learned machine code programming in my spare time (in between drinking and chasing girls).
Richard MacCutchan wrote:
the radix register which allowed it to do calculations in LSD
Did you mean BCD, or was this computer designed by [Timothy Leary](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy\_Leary)? :)
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows. -- 6079 Smith W.
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My first IT job was as a Trainee Programmer, working on an ICL 1901, with 16K, (words), of memory and no hard disk. All data processing was done via mag tape. Programs (COBOL & Plan Assembler) were hand-written on coding sheets and punched on to paper tape, by the punch & verify team. Your program was compiled overnight, by the operators, and in the morning you arrived in fear of the missing full-stop, that generated dozens, (sometimes hundreds) of compile errors. There was no Development, Test or UAT systems. Just Production. These days, I tweak a few lines of code; build/compile; unit test; repeat. Sometimes dozens of times for the same routine - because I can't be @rsed to think through how the whole program should work. And then I have the 'safety nets' of Code Review, QA and UAT. Who'd have thought 40 years ago, I'd be sitting here today with my own computer (with a screen!) gradually honing my code until I manage to get something close to working. Back then I'd have been happy to have a sharp pencil. In those days, you had to be disciplined and you had to get everything right. The young people of today... The Four Yorkshiremen Sketch - YouTube[^]
5teveH wrote:
When I were a young'un, we had to do all our computing on stone henge, with missing stones!
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows. -- 6079 Smith W.
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My first IT job was as a Trainee Programmer, working on an ICL 1901, with 16K, (words), of memory and no hard disk. All data processing was done via mag tape. Programs (COBOL & Plan Assembler) were hand-written on coding sheets and punched on to paper tape, by the punch & verify team. Your program was compiled overnight, by the operators, and in the morning you arrived in fear of the missing full-stop, that generated dozens, (sometimes hundreds) of compile errors. There was no Development, Test or UAT systems. Just Production. These days, I tweak a few lines of code; build/compile; unit test; repeat. Sometimes dozens of times for the same routine - because I can't be @rsed to think through how the whole program should work. And then I have the 'safety nets' of Code Review, QA and UAT. Who'd have thought 40 years ago, I'd be sitting here today with my own computer (with a screen!) gradually honing my code until I manage to get something close to working. Back then I'd have been happy to have a sharp pencil. In those days, you had to be disciplined and you had to get everything right. The young people of today... The Four Yorkshiremen Sketch - YouTube[^]
5teveH wrote:
Your program was compiled overnight
By 'eck lad, you 'ad it easy! When I started we had to punch the 'oles into leather straps with our teeth, then walk 500 miles to feed it by 'and through t'reader, and output was by electric shock! No but seriously, hand-punched cards (eventually we got one of these[^]) using a hand-held thingy. It was a chunk of metal with 12 square holes in it, and a square "poker" thing you used to push individual chads out, having looked up the hole pattern for the character you wanted. Then you sent the card deck off by post (from the Post Office) to the University, and a couple of weeks later you got your punching errors back. You re-punched, sent it off, and if you were lucky got your compilation errors back. Eventually you got "Hello World" or the equivalent, and jumped for joy! :laugh: That was at school... But yes, once graduated and working in London, initially we wrote out Cobol coding sheets by hand, sent them down to the girls in the punchroom (you were supposed to leave them in the tray outside, but going in was too much temptation for some). The next day you'd take your cards down to the ops room; we had both ICL1904 machines with George III (and a teletype interface too!) or the faster IBM 360 machine. Remember "the well" on the ICL machines - effectively a queue of waiting jobs, but a prioritised one where, as a junior programmer doing testing, your jobs were being constantly overtaken by production work. Some jobs, those needing significant resources (like more than 32kwords), might sit in the well for days... then oh! the Joy of a VDU screen with TSO!
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Richard MacCutchan wrote:
the radix register which allowed it to do calculations in LSD
Did you mean BCD, or was this computer designed by [Timothy Leary](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy\_Leary)? :)
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows. -- 6079 Smith W.
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No I mean our old currency: £sd - pounds, shillings - of which there were 20 in a pound, and pence - of which there were 12 in a shilling. So £2/13/11 + £5/8/4 = £8/2/3.
I know what UK currency was like before decimalisation, but I've never seen it called LSD. Thanks for clearing that up for me.
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows. -- 6079 Smith W.
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I know what UK currency was like before decimalisation, but I've never seen it called LSD. Thanks for clearing that up for me.
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows. -- 6079 Smith W.
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I still have my flowchart template somewhere. Going to spend the next 5 hours trying to find, it!! :doh:
I found that the surest way to get more runs was to occasionally show up in the machine room with 12 dozen homemade, still warm chocolate chip cookies (one advantage of living fairly close to work). I could've gotten away with murder for at least a couple of weeks after that.
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and I thought I was old! I started on an AS400
To err is human to really elephant it up you need a computer
When I started, the first project I was on used a Honeywell 200, a Four Phase mini, a Perkin-Elmer (later Interdata) 8/32 and an IBM 370/158, with languages including Assembler (3 different flavors), Cobol, Fortran, PL/I and RPG, plus MVS JCL. Somewhere around here I still have the textbooks and manuals for the IBM side of things; the others have all thankfully vanished into the mists of time.
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My first IT job was as a Trainee Programmer, working on an ICL 1901, with 16K, (words), of memory and no hard disk. All data processing was done via mag tape. Programs (COBOL & Plan Assembler) were hand-written on coding sheets and punched on to paper tape, by the punch & verify team. Your program was compiled overnight, by the operators, and in the morning you arrived in fear of the missing full-stop, that generated dozens, (sometimes hundreds) of compile errors. There was no Development, Test or UAT systems. Just Production. These days, I tweak a few lines of code; build/compile; unit test; repeat. Sometimes dozens of times for the same routine - because I can't be @rsed to think through how the whole program should work. And then I have the 'safety nets' of Code Review, QA and UAT. Who'd have thought 40 years ago, I'd be sitting here today with my own computer (with a screen!) gradually honing my code until I manage to get something close to working. Back then I'd have been happy to have a sharp pencil. In those days, you had to be disciplined and you had to get everything right. The young people of today... The Four Yorkshiremen Sketch - YouTube[^]
As kids, we used to draw on these manilla coloured cards with little rectangles missing. Always different to each other and seemingly nonsense patterns. Years later, found out they all belonged to a single program which had been scattered when Mum tripped over crossing the road at Uni one day. :laugh: I still miss the HP calculator Dad used to borrow from work sometimes that took little sticks with magnetic tape on em for storing programs. (Perhaps a HP29C) Playing that moon-lander simulation was teh best! :-D