DIYbanter - View Single Post - Correlation: Woodworkers and Computer Vets

dpb

wrote:
On Apr 15, 3:09 pm, "John Grossbohlin"
wrote:
wrote in message

news:71c6c$4bc74b5f$d1ac0dbb$5518@allthenewsgroups .com...

yeah. It's not often anymore I get to explain something to my 28 year old
making-a-ton-of-$-programming son.
Anybody here under 60?
(born in the first half of the last century)
How about the last half of the last century?

Guess I was an early adopter as I started playing with IBM 360 main frames
in the early 70s as a kid. This via an Boy Scout Explorer Post that was
sponsored by IBM... Playing is probably the correct term as Fortran and APL
things we did were pretty basic. I recall playing a tank vs aircraft game on
an APL terminal... piles of paper spewed out of what was pretty much an IBM
Selectric typewriter! As I recall it was via a 300 baud acoustic coupler
modem.

I started playing with ForTran in high school. The local university
wanted to see if high school students could learn to program
(really). At the time ('67), CS was in the Graduate College and for
the most part only graduate math students took CS coursework. They
offered PLATO terminals to the local high schools but the school
boards (some things never change), in their infinite wisdom, refused
them. "If computers do the math, student's won't learn math." The
university then gave any student who would show up, free books,
classroom space, unlimited computer time (360/75, no less), and
instructors. I did it for two years, until I started college. After
than, other than one required course in college (the same course, same
books, as I'd already done in HS), I didn't use a computer again until
I graduated, and stared designing them for IBM. ;-)

NE Department taught FORTRAN via paper coding only in 2nd-semester
"Intro to NE" department prerequisite before start core class work/labs
sophomore year. Was taught entirely on paper w/ coding forms and
walkthrough to judge correctness until semester-end assignment was
submitted to the uni 370 compiler. Eng'g had 1620 for undergraduates
for lab work w/ the ubiquitous Selectric as "console" but no line
printer -- everything went in on cards and came out on cards that were
fed to printer. More than once did that pos eat a card deck at end...

That was starting in '63; they had taught the same sequence for
several years at that point altho had moved up a notch or two from the
original FORTRAN to McCracken by the time I got there (and had dropped
the machine code segment except for the obligatory of "this is how
_real_ programmers _used_ to have to do it"

).

After uni, graduated to Philco 2000's at B&W until they were replaced by
CDC 6600s and eventually Cyber 7600s. Never had another IBM mainframe
(thankfully) in subsequent 40 years except for an occasional requirement
to use the ORNL machines on contract work for them altho most of it was
on the DEC 10/20...

Then came VAXen and VMS and the world was never the same...

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