dpb wrote:

Lew Hodgett wrote:
Larry Blanchard wrote:


It makes me really appreciate todays technology when I recall acoustic
couplers and paper tape on a teletype :-).

Yep, had to have been there to appreciate that...my all-time
favorite was the HP instrument built around the HP-1000 w/ the
three-pass paper-tape compiler...

Lockheed made a minicomputer named SUE - System User Engineered - shades of J
Cash :-). I think I mentioned this once before, but:

1. Type in your Fortran source and out onto paper tape (all I/O was paper tape
on the system we had).
2. Load the Fortran compiler
3. Load your source tape and punch out assembler source.
4. Load the assembler
5. Load your assembler source and punch out object code.
6. Load the link editor
7. Feed in your object code
8. Feed in at least one library tape, usually two or three and punch out an
executable.
9. Feed in the executable - if any bugs, start over.

All at 10 chars per second (110 baud) unless you used "ghost code" for the
output tapes. That reduced throughput to 5 chars per second but saved the
teletype ribbon and platen.

I'm sometimes amazed I still have most of my hair. But at the time
(1968-1970) it was just normal operation.


--
It's turtles, all the way down