cavelamb wrote in
m:

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)

chuckling

Some code that I wrote in the '60s is still in production. grin


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.

As an old "bit banger", myself, I learned early on to appreciate the use
of assemblers/compilers as, quite simply, a faster way to handle a lot of
the "housekeeping".

One nice feature of several companies' compilers was the ability to start
out with an "envelope" using one language, shift into another one, pop
back into the "envelope" and, then, shift into yet another one before
going back to the original *all while doing in-line code*. These
"hybrids" enabled functionality that, otherwise, would have proven
exceptionally difficult if not impossible. [Yah, I wound up doing a lot
of "unique" code over the years. grin]


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