Nostalgia in Programming
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flip the NEXT switch UP once to advance to the next memory location, enter the instruction using the 8 DATA switches, then flip the WRITE switch once to save it. ;P
Will Rogers never met me.
Reminds me of toggling in the bootstrap loader on the PDP-11/20.
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I was just daydreaming and thinking about the differences between the HTTP GET and POST verbs (OK, I'm a little tired, OK? The mind wanders) and I suddenly remembered a trick I had to do in the wee early days of the internet when posting article content. We used to have to split the content into small chunks before sending it in the form postback, and then rebuild it on the server end. What sort of relatively recent stuff (this was 10 years ago) did you used to have to do to get your apps to work?
cheers Chris Maunder
Giving away my age ... I started wiring boards for EAM (look it up) equipment. The trays of cards (80 characters each) were diagonally marked (magic marker) in case the cards were dropped...ugh. When I graduated to an 8k 1401, the 80 character boot strap area (programs loaded from cards - no OS) was hard wired to the card reader and the next 132 characters were hard wired to the printer. It made for interesting issues when additional code was required in the middle of run: code had to be interspersed with data cards. To top that off, I worked in a large display window on Madison Ave, since IBM liked to show off their equipment. The first communications project I worked on used punched card readers for remote input and IBM Selectric typewriters as output devices. It ran on a dedicated 360/40 256k mainframe with 24k of OS and 3-28 mbyte disk drives. You had to watch the register lights on the console to "see" if the system was in a tight loop. Using current IDEs (VS2013 and Eclipse) and targeting various device types, I don't miss the "Good Old Days" at all. The most agile activity back then was trying not to trip on cables. Abbott Fleur
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I was just daydreaming and thinking about the differences between the HTTP GET and POST verbs (OK, I'm a little tired, OK? The mind wanders) and I suddenly remembered a trick I had to do in the wee early days of the internet when posting article content. We used to have to split the content into small chunks before sending it in the form postback, and then rebuild it on the server end. What sort of relatively recent stuff (this was 10 years ago) did you used to have to do to get your apps to work?
cheers Chris Maunder
Let's see, I've never done embedded programming so my limitations weren't too bad. On the PDP-11/20 running RSTS with BASIC-Plus, you had an 8KB address space for your program and data. Since it was interpreted, code comments took up space and thus were discouraged. Variable names weren't a space issue since they were limited to upper case letters A-Z, optionally followed by a digit, optionally followed by a type indicator: No type indicator was a floating point number, a type indicator of '%' was a 16 bit integer, and a type indicator of '$' was a string. Given the address space limitations, most programs were broken into one or more data entry programs which interacted with the user, did limited data validation, wrote the input data into a temporary file, and then passed control to another program, using the "CHAIN" keyword, that did additional validations, including file-based validations, and if everything was OK, updated the actual production data files. If there was a data problem, the program would CHAIN back to the data entry program with a link to a temporary file that had information about what was wrong with the data. The file system was equally primitive. You read and wrote 512 byte blocks of data from/to the disk. The rest was up to the developer. Some people wrote indexes which lived in separate files and sped up access. I wrote a hash-based lookup with collision detection and handling.
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Giving away my age ... I started wiring boards for EAM (look it up) equipment. The trays of cards (80 characters each) were diagonally marked (magic marker) in case the cards were dropped...ugh. When I graduated to an 8k 1401, the 80 character boot strap area (programs loaded from cards - no OS) was hard wired to the card reader and the next 132 characters were hard wired to the printer. It made for interesting issues when additional code was required in the middle of run: code had to be interspersed with data cards. To top that off, I worked in a large display window on Madison Ave, since IBM liked to show off their equipment. The first communications project I worked on used punched card readers for remote input and IBM Selectric typewriters as output devices. It ran on a dedicated 360/40 256k mainframe with 24k of OS and 3-28 mbyte disk drives. You had to watch the register lights on the console to "see" if the system was in a tight loop. Using current IDEs (VS2013 and Eclipse) and targeting various device types, I don't miss the "Good Old Days" at all. The most agile activity back then was trying not to trip on cables. Abbott Fleur
I worked on an IBM 360/40 with 256k core memory. There were a few disks, but a majority of our work was done with tape. Do you remember how to do a master file update with the master on one tape drive and the updates on another tape drive with the new master going to a third tape drive? Needless to say, I preferred the PDP-11/20 I mentioned in another post.
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Long time ago...... programming a PDP 11/45 via the front console. Load an address and insert the octal instruction 014747. Then start running from the address you loaded the instruction (single stepping the execution is more fun!) The "program", a single instruction, will cause the computer to run "backwards" and fill memory backwards from the starting point with 014747 until it gives a hardware trap (address error.)
The idle loop on RSTS would make the console lights cycle in a clockwise direction. You could tell how busy the CPU was by watching to see how often and how long the idle loop display was interrupted. Once the system was down for a hardware failure, so we wrote and toggled in our own "idle loop", except it cycled the console lights in a counter-clockwise direction. We waited as other developers came into the computer room to see why they couldn't log on. Only one developer figured out there was a problem by simply seeing the console lights cycling backwards. The rest asked us if there was a problem.
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I was just daydreaming and thinking about the differences between the HTTP GET and POST verbs (OK, I'm a little tired, OK? The mind wanders) and I suddenly remembered a trick I had to do in the wee early days of the internet when posting article content. We used to have to split the content into small chunks before sending it in the form postback, and then rebuild it on the server end. What sort of relatively recent stuff (this was 10 years ago) did you used to have to do to get your apps to work?
cheers Chris Maunder
Chris Maunder wrote:
What sort of relatively recent stuff (this was 10 years ago) did you used to have to do to get your apps to work?
Boot Windows with NUMCPUS=1 on an early dual core machine so our video recording software would continue to work when we stopped recording the audio. Oh, and the OS happily ignored the directive and ran itself and our software on both CPU cores anyway, but only with NUMCPUS=1 did our software run correctly.
We can program with only 1's, but if all you've got are zeros, you've got nothing.
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I worked on an IBM 360/40 with 256k core memory. There were a few disks, but a majority of our work was done with tape. Do you remember how to do a master file update with the master on one tape drive and the updates on another tape drive with the new master going to a third tape drive? Needless to say, I preferred the PDP-11/20 I mentioned in another post.
I left off that I was a 7094 tape jockey (in the same window). That was a 32k machine with a card reader the size of a very large generator and 14 tape drives. It billed out @ $700/hr. The OS (IBSYS) was on 1 tape. IBM did all their 360 simulations on the 7094. To make life a little easier we had a utility program (on 1 card) that rewound all the tapes at once so we didn't have to walk around and do it by hand.
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StarNamer_ wrote:
I remember that about 30 years ago
It was the early 1970's and it was a PDP8 if my memory serves me correctly. It used to drop out a lot so I got pretty good at doing it also. :cool:
The report of my death was an exaggeration - Mark Twain
Simply Elegant Designs JimmyRopes Designs
I'm on-line therefore I am. JimmyRopesI was at Manchester University in the Physics Department from 1978 to 1986 as a Research Associate so it would have been either 1979 or 1980 and it was definitely a PDP-11 that we had. I also used a PDP-8 (and a PDP-10) in 1974/5/6 as an undergraduate at Oxford. Also a PDP-7, a PDP-9 and a PDP-15 while at Manchester. All of them were 'proper' computers with a panel of lights and a row of toggle switches!
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Gawd! Back in the early days (when I was all embedded, and only had 4K of ROM and 4K of RAM to play with) there were all the tricks: self modifying code, undocumented processor features (that only worked in the pre V3 hardware mask), hand tuned spaghetti assembler, all the kinds of things that I recoil from these days! Nowadays, all I have to do is pour the blood of a virgin sacrifice into the DVD drive and Windows does the rest... Mind you, you wouldn't believe how hard it is find that around here these days!
Those who fail to learn history are doomed to repeat it. --- George Santayana (December 16, 1863 – September 26, 1952) Those who fail to clear history are doomed to explain it. --- OriginalGriff (February 24, 1959 – ∞)
OriginalGriff wrote:
Back in the early days (when I was all embedded, and only had 4K of ROM and 4K of RAM to play with) there were all the tricks: self modifying code, undocumented processor features (that only worked in the pre V3 hardware mask), hand tuned spaghetti assembler, all the kinds of things that I recoil from these days!
And here I thought I had purged memories of debugging code where the original programmer was jumping into the middle of instructions hoping they'd be interpreted as NOPs just to save a byte here and there to make the game fit into a 2K ROM cartridge. I remember we tried jumping up and down on the chips, but it didn't make the bits fit any better, but we all felt better nonetheless.
Psychosis at 10 Film at 11 Those who do not remember the past, are doomed to repeat it. Those who do not remember the past, cannot build upon it.
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I was just daydreaming and thinking about the differences between the HTTP GET and POST verbs (OK, I'm a little tired, OK? The mind wanders) and I suddenly remembered a trick I had to do in the wee early days of the internet when posting article content. We used to have to split the content into small chunks before sending it in the form postback, and then rebuild it on the server end. What sort of relatively recent stuff (this was 10 years ago) did you used to have to do to get your apps to work?
cheers Chris Maunder
Also related to very early days in Web programming. I remember we had a Sun Web Server that had to interact with some legacy system and we lacked connectivity libraries to it; however there was a command line tool that could process simple queries and dump them to the screen. We used a CGI C executable that piped and redirected the screen output of the command line tool. We had to parse the screen-based report to extract the data fields, but eventually managed to provide exactly what the customer was asking for. :cool:
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eBay!
Those who fail to learn history are doomed to repeat it. --- George Santayana (December 16, 1863 – September 26, 1952) Those who fail to clear history are doomed to explain it. --- OriginalGriff (February 24, 1959 – ∞)
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OriginalGriff wrote:
eBay!
You know, part of the spam filters you should apply is your mind. If something is too good to be true... Virginity on auction, Really???
KP Lee wrote:
Virginity on auction, Really???
Yes, really...[^] :sigh:
Those who fail to learn history are doomed to repeat it. --- George Santayana (December 16, 1863 – September 26, 1952) Those who fail to clear history are doomed to explain it. --- OriginalGriff (February 24, 1959 – ∞)
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KP Lee wrote:
Virginity on auction, Really???
Yes, really...[^] :sigh:
Those who fail to learn history are doomed to repeat it. --- George Santayana (December 16, 1863 – September 26, 1952) Those who fail to clear history are doomed to explain it. --- OriginalGriff (February 24, 1959 – ∞)
That's just like the E-mail that wants to send me $5000/wk until the $1m is disbursed to me. (or better yet, the $1.3) All I have to do is send my name and address and maybe some other harmless information like my Social Security Card # or my bank #, to get all this money sent to me. Generally because I'm a victim of a scam or they want me to help them steal the money for a generous split. I like the fact they intend to re-sell the virginity once it has been sold the first time. It's both amusing and sad to think how gullible they think I am. (Sad because: they do it because it is a profitable ploy.)
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Been there, did that on a DEC PDP-11/05 at school. The machine stored its 80 word bootstrap in a piece of core memory. Student programs routinely wiped the bootstrap due to an errant addressing mode or somesuch. I had to do it once or twice. One guy became legendary for his ability to enter the bootstrap in under 60 seconds. Of course, that doesn't say much for how he acquired the skill...
Software Zen:
delete this;Happily I only had to do it with one machine, an Altair 8800. Once I built a circuit to connect it to a Teletype ASR 33, I wrote the bootstrap program to load the OS from paper tape. Then I wrote the OS in stages, along with an Assembler. Once those got manually entered, I punched them all to tape and never had to enter anything that way again, except the bootstrap code. :-D
Will Rogers never met me.
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Happily I only had to do it with one machine, an Altair 8800. Once I built a circuit to connect it to a Teletype ASR 33, I wrote the bootstrap program to load the OS from paper tape. Then I wrote the OS in stages, along with an Assembler. Once those got manually entered, I punched them all to tape and never had to enter anything that way again, except the bootstrap code. :-D
Will Rogers never met me.
That's a familiar story. My stepdad had a COSMAC ELF single-board computer he built from a kit (he's a EE, so he knows which end of a soldering iron to hold). He added a KSR 33 teletype for I/O, and hand-assembled code to run it. We found a Tiny BASIC interpreter that would run on the board that was about 1.5K, so we spent a weekend fat-fingering it in on the board's hex keypad and debugging the I/O. After we got it working, he hooked up a car battery as a backup so that we wouldn't have to do that again.
Software Zen:
delete this; -
That's a familiar story. My stepdad had a COSMAC ELF single-board computer he built from a kit (he's a EE, so he knows which end of a soldering iron to hold). He added a KSR 33 teletype for I/O, and hand-assembled code to run it. We found a Tiny BASIC interpreter that would run on the board that was about 1.5K, so we spent a weekend fat-fingering it in on the board's hex keypad and debugging the I/O. After we got it working, he hooked up a car battery as a backup so that we wouldn't have to do that again.
Software Zen:
delete this;Gary Wheeler wrote:
After we got it working, he hooked up a car battery as a backup so that we wouldn't have to do that again.
I wish I'd been smart enough to do that! During the initial development the power often blinked, which required me to start the hand loading process over again. After 4 or 5 restarts in a single evening (it was a night job, after classes, at a different Uni), the charm sorta wore off.
Will Rogers never met me.
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Gary Wheeler wrote:
After we got it working, he hooked up a car battery as a backup so that we wouldn't have to do that again.
I wish I'd been smart enough to do that! During the initial development the power often blinked, which required me to start the hand loading process over again. After 4 or 5 restarts in a single evening (it was a night job, after classes, at a different Uni), the charm sorta wore off.
Will Rogers never met me.
We cheated. The car battery was part of a battery-backup system he'd rigged for the sump pump in our basement. It only took a few mA to keep the thing running, especially since most of the board was CMOS.
Software Zen:
delete this;
