Re: Slightly off-topic
Date: Fri, 17 Jan 2003 22:28:49 GMT
Message-ID: <Bs%V9.148$qa3.17197340_at_newssvr15.news.prodigy.com>
DA Morgan wrote:
> Pablo Sanchez wrote:
>
>
>>Frank <fvanbortel_at_netscape.net> wrote in news:3E272741.2010600_at_netscape.net: >> >> >>>Any of you remember Rbase:2000? >> >>Hey Frank, >> >>I remember it but never used it. Do you remember UNIFY and ACCEL/IDS? >> >>And right beforing hitting the hay last night, I remembered the other >>HP product I was using: Image/3000 heh heh! Yup, I actually learned COBOL >>to work with Image/3000 >>-- >>Pablo Sanchez, High-Performance Database Engineering >>http://www.hpdbe.com
>
>
> I ante up with Fortran IV on an IBM 360 with boxes of punch cards.
>
> Anybody out there remember PDPs with 8K RAM or XDS or Lockheed or CDC or
> Honeywell or breadboards? Feel free to jump in.
>
> BTW: Anyone have any of those knitting needles we used to use to sort
> databases?
>
> Daniel Morgan
>
My first programming job was with Autocoder on an IBM 1401. I'm too old to still be working. :)
There was no such thing as an O/S on the 1401 ... and you had to set an "end wordmark" or your program would run right off the upper end of memory. Then I got a consulting job for a local utility company converting Autocoder to COBOL. Autocoder was "possibly the first primitive compiler ... written by Alick Glennie in 1952".
One site even has a 3-line Hello World example written in 1401 Autocoder:
http://www.cuillin.demon.co.uk/nazz/trivia/hw/hw_autocoder.html
Passed thru EAM breadboards, Univac 1108 (with a drum - not a disk - that took nearly a day to spin down), DEC PDPs (some of the older ones made you toggle in the boot program in octal ... just like the original PC kits). When I was in the Air Force, we used a vacuum tube computer (SAGE system) that hardware engineers debugged by twisting a variable resister (potentiometer) until the computer ran slow enough to read the console lights.
But the other day on 60 Minutes I saw a guy who was still working at the age of 102. Compared to that, I'm a spring chicken ... who can't see or hear as well as I used to. Other things are "broken" as well ... but we won't go into that. Sigh. Now where did I put my walker? Received on Fri Jan 17 2003 - 23:28:49 CET