Karl Townsend wrote:
And - even I had a handy dandy slide rule. Mine is a Decilon
8 inch. I still have it and can still do (simple!) manipulations
on it.

But FORTRAN, while in the universities before late 60s, was not
widely used until much later. NASA was mainly doing "machine"
(not even Assembly!).

Heck, I know a guy who almost invented time sharing Visicalc -
but his boss though real computer time was to valuable for any
such silliness!


At least that's the way I remember it...

I was really in to computers back then. After getting extremely good with
fortran, I moved on to a new subject area at that time, industrial
simulation with a program called GPSS. Just a bunch of fortran programs
really. Anyway, I had this huge model of an auto assembly line and got
computer time at 0300 to myself. On the way there, I dropped my monster box
of keypunch cards in the wind and mud and lost them all. Took days to
repunch all those cards. Shortly after, I decided "to heck with this
graduate degree B.S." and got a real job.

Karl




Oh Karl!
Don'cha hate when that happens!


--

Richard Lamb
http://www.home.earthlink.net/~cavelamb/