[Discussion] Old Programmers

[koz at fuse.net]

You guys are making my nostalgic.  I was the fool graduate student in the Biology department who figured that I could save myself time in typing my thesis by learning how to use the school's computer, Script running under CMS on line-at-a-time CRT terminals.  This was a great advance over the keypunching of my SAS and FORTRAN programs for the card reader.

   But the worst thing was watching the industry "progress" over the years:  DOS becoming the 8-bit OS instead of P system;  BASIC becoming the main programming language over damn near anything else; Windows . . .  ('nuff said about that!).   I feel like there's some evil force in nature that compels people who work with computers to make the worst of the available choices - and it all started with the QWERTY keyboard.

John K
Cincinnati


---- Krampetz at aol.com wrote: 
> I hope there aren't many other old geezers that begin those
> nostalgia stories.... ;-)     ..... like that desk  sized ,  punched paper
> tape input or keypunch keypad, with rotating drum memory w/32
> 256 byte sectors,  12 (or 14? instructions) one register and  either
> jump positive or jump negative, (not both - switch controlled),  octal
> or hex entry (switch controlled)..
> was it a  Link Precision General?  can't recall)
> 
> The old clunker (~1960ish donation to the school) was my intro to
> computers in 1966.
> Bob
> 
> 
> In a message dated 4/30/2009 10:16:27 P.M. Pacific Daylight Time,
> rwonder at attglobal.net writes:
> 
> Esther
> 
> Read your article mentioned by Dave Yeo. Very good.  The only thing is
> you are not an old programmer ... there's some of us on  the POSSI list
> who were programming in the mid 50's long before you were  in the mid
> 70's <smile>.
> 
> I learned to program on the bare  metal in binary/octal. Talk about hard
> coding -- pun intended. The machine  instruction codes and addresses were
> hard coded. No symbolic names.  I still remember some of the octal
> instruction codes.
> 
> Bob  Wonderly
> 
> Dave Yeo wrote:
> 
> >
> > Speaking of Esther,  perhaps this article is more on topic?
> >  http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&
> >  articleId=9132061
> >  Dave
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