Anyone remeber CP/M?

[Cho Da]

http://www.cpm.z80.de/

[JMO]

How about the IBM 5100??

http://www.brouhaha.com/~eric/retrocomputing/ibm/5100/

[Brad Gile]

OK, I'll parry with the PDP-11!
http://telnet.hu/hamster/pdp-11/

:D

Brad

[glenn]

OMG. What a site. We had a PDP-8 in high school. Used to write programs that made the red LED's go back and forth like those robots on Battlestar Galactica. No wonder I couldn't get a date. :roll:

[Ben Kenobi]

I cut my programming teeth on a PDP 11-03, affectionately nicknamed the trash compactor, because that's what it looked like.

[failed8v]

This sounds like fun thread drift.

I learned Fortran without touching/seeing a computer. Well it did not go beyond flow-charts, goto statments, format etc. Then in the following year
we used BBC-Micro with 32K and no storage, I tested 6502 assembly language programs too. Those are the fun days. God I am too old to
write these crappy exams :(

[Ben Kenobi]

I learned BASIC the same way. Ah, the joys ( :roll: ) of line numbers and spaghetti code.

[E. Blackadder]

I remember figuring out how to "hang" the 5100. In APL, of course.

[Brad Gile]

In 1969, I was introduced to Fortran IV on the IBM 360. I was given four IBM Fortran manuals to learn the language. Had to punch my own cards for source code and data (1958 CSO and CET Tables). I remember the maximum storage limit was 16K for data and source code combined!



Brad

[glenn]

In 1969,

OK. You win. :D

[Pete Lindquist]

The contest is over? I guess I don't hang out here often enough.

My entry would have been Fortran II for an IBM 1620 in January of 1965. I'd also like to point out that my program not only compiled and executed, but also did what I wanted done.

I don't want to say how far my programming success rate has declined in the subsequent years. But I get everything to work eventually, so my (re-defined) success rate is still 100%, and I rationalize that most of my mental laziness is the inevitable consequence of increased computer speed and ease-of-use software tools (like on-screen editing).

(For the non-dinosaurs in the audience, an IBM 1620 had an "operating system" that consisted of a person who loaded and emptied the card reader and printer, and pushed buttons to make things compile and execute.)

Are there bonus points for knowing what an "object deck" used to be?

Pete

[Arlie_Proctor]

Pete:

I thought I had a decent entry. However, I now realize I have no chance. I never punched my own cards, thank God.

[Chuck]

Contribution to memory lane...

I don't know what kind of computer I started on (early 70's) nor do I remember what brand of Fortran it was. We weren't allowed in the computer room in college. We just dropped the deck of cards in a box outside the door (after adding mysterious jcl cards to the front of the deck, supplied by the computer manager) and came back the next day to pick up the deck with green bar paper wrapped around it. Debug and try again.

I do remember being real excited when we got a card puncher with a memory. You could type in a whole card and review it before hitting a button to actually punch the holes. That was a real time saver.

We also had one of the first non-paper tape calculators that could calculate a square root. It was some Japanese brand with a little blue screen that had space for about five lines of output. It did some kind of successive trial and error calculation that would flash guesses on the screen until it converged on the answer. Took about 10 seconds to get a square root.

In high school, late 60's, all the kids in computer class would walk around with these rolled up little hole-punched paper tapes that I presume pre-dated the punch cards. I wasn't interested then, so don't know much about them.

Chuck

[PK]

I'll bet that those rolled up tapes with the holes were yellow. All the ones I ever saw were. The deal was that there were not terminals available. What was available was teletype machines. The same machine that the companies would use to send a telex. We could write our programs (I learned BASIC in the very early 1970's) and once they were debugged, we could copy them to the tape. I had a tape of a great Star Trek program that I took off to college, but the BASIC compiler at school wasn't big enough to handle the several hundred line program.

[Obi-Wan Kenobi]

Herman Hollerith invented the "modern" punch card to assist with the 1890 US Census, after it took 8 years to tabulate the results for the 1880 Census. His company was one of the founding pieces of Big Blue (IBM). His inspiration was cards used to store weaving patterns.

Paper tape appears to have come into existence at about the same time, for use with the telegraph.

(glenn, we really need an icon for "I'm a geek!")

[JMO]

I could use that icon, too, for my pre-actuarial days. For example, I once put a Fortran compiler into a loop. Yes, the compiler. My job was terminated when the expected number of print lines was exceeded.

Ah, those were the days.