The first major “program” I ever wrote was in Fortran… it played Chess…before you get too impressed … it PLAYED… it did NOT play well. and it was EXPENSIVE …
First off was the deck of cards that made up the program. followed by 64 cards that represented each square on the board and what piece (if any) occupied it… the last card was my move.
After submitting the card deck… the computer chose a legal move… and punched out a NEW deck showing the modifed board, and a messsage card with the move it had just made. and a printout so I could see the board without the cards.
Then I’d choose MY move… punch a card for it… place the 64 cards the computer just punched, plus mine on the end of the deck
and repeat the whole process.
Like I said… expensive… I think I played two or three whole games… and only because I was “buddies” with the night operator
My start was on a TRS-80 Color Computer (version 1–the old battleship gray one). Didn’t write much that was sophisticated, but did hack a basketball game from Rainbow to add the shot clock and 3-pointer.
Grrrrr!! Curses on you all talking about punch cards! Here I’ve spent the last 40 years trying to forget them! Just like I’m trying to forget Cobol, Snobol, Algol, Assembly (6502, 8080, Z80) code, UCSD Pascal, Integer BASIC, Prolog, Ada, etc. Well, since I’m getting older I can be assured I won’t remember them much longer.
In 1963 I was in the Air Force (USAF), station at Elmendorf Air Force Base, Alaska. My Job was running IBM punch card machines. They were replaced by an IBM 1401 Computer. The 1401 was about the size of three phones booth. Attached to the 1401 Computer was four tapes, one printer, and one card reader/punch. Each of the tapes drives was about the size of a phone booth, and the computer had 8k of core memory.
My first program was a Tape Inventory and Management System. It was written in Autocoder, which was an assembler language. Programs were punch into IBM cards and assembled into objects decks, also punch cards.
We had about 50 people writing programs. All of the programs were written in Autocoder. COBOL was tried by some but I did not see anyone get one to run.
My next assignment was Tinker AFB, OK. We had all kind of computers, IBM, NCR, Honeywell, DEC, and others. I had access to most of these and did little programmming in FORTAN, PL/1 and assembler.
I do not know what it takes to program on mainframe today but programming today’s personal computer is nothing like it was in my day. You were limited to 4k address space, you process thousand (million?) of transaction, and it sequential processing. Today PC you have to be prepared for any action the user may take.
[quote=49661:@Norman Palardy]Oh oh PL/1 anyone ?
Or my personal favorite - the only write only language I ever encountered APL ![/quote]
Richard do PL/1 back in 1982. he also programmed in Fortran IV, Fortran V, Fortran 77, Cobol, Easytrieve, Adabas Natural, RPG II, Algol, Pascal, Basic, Forth, TAS and MS Access VBA. Also work with MVS, XA, CICS, JCL etc etc.
Thanks guys - you all make me feel young again Sinclair ZX-81 on my tenth birthday (1990)… My first Mac was a LC-475 which I’d saved up for and bought when I was 14… Dropped out of collage at 17, worked for others for a spat, but had to give it up, been self sustainable (with the help of Xojo of course) ever since.
Yeah I did Adabas Natural for about 5/6 years.
Had to go back to one of my first employers & do a Y2K audit on their payroll system -I’d written it about 8 years earlier a part of a team. Never changed a line of code. DId have to fix a C interface from that to the accounting system though.
That was a nice contract as I replaced 9 people so proportionally
[quote=49419:@Mike Charlesworth]Being a lot younger than you lot I was lucky. I started out on the ZX spectrum 48k powerhouse with cassette recorder. Punched paper pffft, dinosaurs.
I tell you what folks these were a thing of the future. Those who know them, forget your predictive text, you only had to press one key and you had a keyword on the screen. L = Load, G = Gosub, R = Run etc etc. Coding was a blast and to think auto complete and predictive text are now sold as features. Sinclair ruled the day.
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I go to the ZX-80, with the wobbly 16k RAM pack extension. Program all night, then a little shake, wobble and the big crash! Ah, yes, them were the days (for fellow Brits, please hum the music from the Hovis commercials!)
[quote=49815:@Dave S]Ok… since we have the “Way Back Machine” running…
anyone else program in “MARK IV”?
or “RAMIS”?
(anyone else even HEARD of them? )[/quote]
Heard of them? Yes! Used them? Fortunately, I changed jobs just before the old company “endeavored to upgrade to” Mark IV.
In my entire life (so far) the only time I ever broke any bones was when I dropped a 7-disk pack from a VAX 11/780 on my foot. (For those unfamiliar - seven disks, each about 1/4 inch thick and about 20 inches in diameter in a high-impact plastic canister about 24 inches tall.) Three broken toes and a destroyed disk pack. I love flash drives!
Never had to handle the “hardware” at that job. It was a General Dynamics from 1983 to 1993… using IBM 3270 terminals, TSO/JCL, RAMIS, MarkIV and SAS v 5.18 :)…
[quote=49875:@Dale Arends]Heard of them? Yes! Used them? Fortunately, I changed jobs just before the old company “endeavored to upgrade to” Mark IV.
In my entire life (so far) the only time I ever broke any bones was when I dropped a 7-disk pack from a VAX 11/780 on my foot. (For those unfamiliar - seven disks, each about 1/4 inch thick and about 20 inches in diameter in a high-impact plastic canister about 24 inches tall.) Three broken toes and a destroyed disk pack. I love flash drives![/quote]
Been there - dropped one
I was so glad when we swapped those machines out for newer ones & updated to SCSI drives for our clusters
Soon after I got my first personal computer, an Apple IIe, someone gave me a copy of their program Apple Write(I think that was the name). I put the disk into the disk drive and the display ask if I wanted to Initialize it. I responded with “yes”. ( In all the programs I had written the 1st thing I did was initialize.)
Not what you want do to disk with stuff on it you want to keep.
… it PLAYED… it did NOT play well. and it was EXPENSIVE …
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