RAM³ wrote:
cavelamb wrote in
:

Don Foreman wrote:
On Sun, 28 Mar 2010 16:32:01 -0500, Wes wrote:

cavelamb wrote:

And, he didn't have AutoCAD or Alibre to do his designs VBG

Karl



Neither did NASA when we went to the moon.

I wonder how much sooner we would have got there if the engineers
had a scientific calculator instead of those books of logarithms?

Wes
That capability was available if needed. There were Frieden
calculators, Kurta calculators, and FORTRAN became commercially
available in 1957.

I beg to argue, Don.

Even through the late 1960s, the term "computer" referred to a
woman who operated an "adding machine". Even at NASA.

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...



Your memory is faulty. grin

In '64 the tiny college in Kingsville, TX, was using an IBM 1620 (with an
"astounding" 40K BITS of magnetic core storage) to not only keep the
student records and the financial records of the institution but was
providing the Celenese plant at Bishop, TX, with accounting services.

This was in addition to teaching students to program the machine in
machine code, assembly language, Fortran, Fortran With Format, Fortran
II, and FORGO (a compile-and-go variant of Fortran).

The "Business Schools" of the '66-'70 period often offered Fortran IV and
COBOL programming "degrees" to their "students". Cobol, BTW, had already
become the standard for business applications.

I signed on with the City of Houston as a beginning programmer in early
'68 and envied the salaries of those at NASA in Clear Lake. (After all,
50% differential is significant.) While there was some assembler work
being done (at both sites) the bulk of the activity was in COBOL with
some FORTRAN activity remaining. (Most of the really cute code was
already in production by then.)

I was referring to NASA, but ok, won't make a federal case out of it.


But the NASA stuff - oh boy - orbital rendezvous, burn times and attitudes,
mission stuff - once that was pretty much debugged, it became holy code.

You know that once someone got a program running it would be used forever.
(witness the Y2K scare in commercial circles)

So while the new kids came in with their fancy new languages, the old geezers
who wrote the original stuff kept right on banging bits together.

And if we go back to the early missions like Mercury...
Rock for zero, stick for one...



--

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