[ExI] Old Programming Languages

[Anders Sandberg]

I'm of course a total whipper-snapper when it comes to programming, 
having grown up with BASIC like any child of the 70-80s. But I did learn 
how to program early 1950s machine code.

The reason was my teacher, Thorbjörn Alfredsson, who had been a graduate 
student in the BESK project, Sweden's second computer: 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BESK
He had the distinction of being probably the only person to have his 
foot crushed by a falling byte - he had extended the drawer in the rack 
of Williams-tubes too far and dropped it on his foot.

As an exercise in high-school he had us write programs in its 
instruction set. Not too different from modern machine code, although 
the initial "Load two instructions from the paper tape" instruction was 
a bit unusual (one instruction was 20 bits, the word length was 40, so 
it loaded one word at a time). All programs began by a sequence of the 
instruction to load enough of the program into memory; if you had a long 
program it might have to overwrite some parts of itself during 
execution. To actually start the program you flipped switches manually 
on the front to set up the command at address zero in memory and pressed 
'go'.

I later had Hans Riesel - the big prime guy in Sweden - across the hall 
when I was at KTH. He used BESK in 1957 to find the Mersenne prime 
2^3217-1.

-- 
Anders Sandberg,
Future of Humanity Institute
Oxford Martin School
Faculty of Philosophy
Oxford University