Been practicing my compute

[Kzoo]

[maddmaxx ★]

You know, some of my early work was on systems almost that big

About as long as your living room wall, 32K worth of memory (core type), teletypes, card readers, the whole hog.

[Ralphie ★]

Excellent!  It may be the zenith of civilization to have the world at your fingertips whilst pooping.

 

[jsharr ★]

10.00 sez da meter

[MickinMD ★]

22 hours ago, maddmaxx said:

You know, some of my early work was on systems almost that big

About as long as your living room wall, 32K worth of memory (core type), teletypes, card readers, the whole hog.

When I took my first programming course in college in the major language around 1970, Fortran, I had to punch the programs onto key cards, drop them off at the university's computer office, and pick them up at 2 pm the next day!

Then, around 1971, our chemistry department got a "Wang 700," about 4x the size of a typical computer printer/scanner/fax of today, and a professor schooled us in machine language.  There were four levers representing 1, 2, 4, and 8 and you flipped them up or down then pressed enter to register each step and then stored the program on a cassette tape.  I wrote programs to interpret data from the chart paper records of measured chemistry reactions.

Later, the Apple II came out and I wrote, in machine language similar to what I'd learned on the Wang and with an assembly language generator provided by Steve Wozniak, Castles of Darkness, the first animated computer adventure game, which gets me a mention in the Giant List of Classic Game Programmers.

[Dottleshead ★]

5 hours ago, jsharr said:

10.00 sez da meter

Agreed.  This was pretty darn good.

[maddmaxx ★]

1 hour ago, MickinMD said:

When I took my first programming course in college in the major language around 1970, Fortran, I had to punch the programs onto key cards, drop them off at the university's computer office, and pick them up at 2 pm the next day!

Then, around 1971, our chemistry department got a "Wang 700," about 4x the size of a typical computer printer/scanner/fax of today, and a professor schooled us in machine language.  There were four levers representing 1, 2, 4, and 8 and you flipped them up or down then pressed enter to register each step and then stored the program on a cassette tape.  I wrote programs to interpret data from the chart paper records of measured chemistry reactions.

Later, the Apple II came out and I wrote, in machine language similar to what I'd learned on the Wang and with an assembly language generator provided by Steve Wozniak, Castles of Darkness, the first animated computer adventure game, which gets me a mention in the Giant List of Classic Game Programmers.

We did the data collection on jet engine runs in the test cells at Pratt and Whitney with the machine I described.  It was the same deal but there were 16 switches.  We had to use them to input a program for troubleshooting so that we could enable the teletype or the card reader.  Then we could load the actual troubleshooting routines.  Everything at that level was raw machine coding.  Once we got the system running then the actual programming of the test cell could be in assembler.  With the small supply of memory, good assembly programmers were valuable to make the smallest sized programs possible.  Those were the days.  Then in the way way back days the computers that the navy had in the 60's and 70's were much much more primitive.   We had extreme environmental problems as a 1000 card program or data deck suddenly wouldn't run because humidity made the cards swell and stick in the readers.