[extropy-chat] History of the portable computer

[Dan Clemmensen]

MB wrote:

>:) Data retrieval work (of all things) in Fortran on the Univac
>1108.... which sorta dates *me*, doesn't it. :)))
>
>Regards,
>MB
>
>
>On Fri, 25 Mar 2005, scerir wrote:
>
>  
>
>>>You young kids have it too easy nowadays.
>>>      
>>>
>>By chance, does anyone remember those FORTRAN punched cards?
>>http://www.cs.uiowa.edu/~jones/cards/collection/i-program.html
>>Or am I alone here?
>>s.
>>
>>    
>>
My first program was in FORTRAN. Not FORTRAN IV, Not FORTRAN II, but the
original FORTRAN, for the IBM 1620, in 1969.

I did FORTRAN IV, COBOL,and assembler in college, all on punched cards. 
I did
three years as an assembly programmer in the US Army, All on punched 
cards. I did
two years of assembly programming for Sperry UNIVAC (9400 series) 
Punched cards again.
I did a year as a system programmer on a CDC 3800, mostly assembler. 
Punched cards again.
When we finally moved to a Burroughs 6700, I implemented a timesharing 
system and
most of my work was on a "glass teletype" style terminal, systems 
programming in ALGOL.
But the Burroughs had a truly magnificent 1000 CPM card reader.

Just to calibrate, here: a medium-sized program on punched cards (6000 
lines) filled two card boxes
and weighed more than one of today's laptops. The actual computer (take 
the Burroughs 6700 as an
example) had a two microsecond memory access and a one microsecond cycle 
time: slower by
a factor of 1000 than a cheap laptop. We supported about 20 timesharing 
terminals, which in turn
supported an active community of about 70 programmers.