[extropy-chat] History of the portable computer

[MB]

Well greetings to you too, oldtimer! :)))

I studied Cobol, but never (thank god) had to use it. :) This was in
the mid-late 60s. I also studied assembler in school, and was
introduced to machine language which I no longer remember. And wiring
control panels for ... a sorter and a printer, I think...

How about debugging with those octal dumps from the 1108? 8D

We got our first terminal on the hall about the time I left that job.
I never knew what it was for as we were not permitted to touch it!

And I did not mess with another computer until we got an Apple for our
kids.

Regards,
MB


On Fri, 25 Mar 2005, Dan Clemmensen wrote:


> 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.