Taking the bull by its horns [was background]

[Martin DeMello]

Why? Please explain!

Nobody RExpects the Spanish Inquisition!

martin

 

[Bertram Scharpf]

Godwin's Law.

 

[I. P.]

|Robert Dober|

{
:gender => :male,
:age => 23.years,
:location => 'Saint-Petersburg, Russia',
:current_work => 'QA'
}

= Langs

- C++, x86 asm, Prolog (was taught, but never used)
- QBasic (learned myself, used few times and happily forgot)
- Object Pascal/Delphi, Java, Ruby (learned myself and is using
nowadays)
- XSLT/XSL:FO, TeX/LaTeX (does it counts?)

 

[Robert Dober]

I think most of us realised a while ago, and didn't think it worth
mentioning

No of course not, only in the context of the thread in question!

 

[Morton Goldberg]

When I worked in a 1620 shop, we had a 407 to generate the reports
from
punched cards out of the 1620.

A 407? I used one of those to print punched card output from the 650.
I remember it as an early to mid 1950s accounting machine which was
programmed by means of huge patch panels. Wasn't a 407 a bit retro in
the 1620 era? I think IBM offered a some kind of real line printer
for the 1620, but since my company never got one, I don't remember
any details.

Regards, Morton

 

[M. Edward (Ed) Borasky]

A 407? I used one of those to print punched card output from the 650. I
remember it as an early to mid 1950s accounting machine which was
programmed by means of huge patch panels. Wasn't a 407 a bit retro in
the 1620 era? I think IBM offered a some kind of real line printer for
the 1620, but since my company never got one, I don't remember any details.

Regards, Morton

This was decidedly a low-budget shop. I think we got a line printer when
we upgraded to the 1130, but I don't really remember.

 

[John W. Kennedy]

Oh, yes, I just remembered. The 1620 brought two firsts to my
programming experience: a drum plotter and a disk storage unit. I really
enjoyed writing programs that did output to the plotter.

The only plotter IBM ever offered commercially, if I recall aright,
staying in the product line years after the rest of the system had
dropped out.

 

[John W. Kennedy]

A 407? I used one of those to print punched card output from the 650. I
remember it as an early to mid 1950s accounting machine which was
programmed by means of huge patch panels. Wasn't a 407 a bit retro in
the 1620 era? I think IBM offered a some kind of real line printer for
the 1620, but since my company never got one, I don't remember any details.

It could attach a 1443, which had maintenance problems of its own.

Keeping the good ol' 407 made sense in the 1620 context, Even on decimal
hardware, FORTRAN II was a kinda sucky language to do your
accounts-payable in. And you could use a 407 as an 80/80 lister to
desk-check your FORTRAN code before compiling--that was a very common
practice in those days.
--
John W. Kennedy
"There are those who argue that everything breaks even in this old dump
of a world of ours. I suppose these ginks who argue that way hold that
because the rich man gets ice in the summer and the poor man gets it in
the winter things are breaking even for both. Maybe so, but I'll swear I
can't see it that way."
-- The last words of Bat Masterson

 

[John W. Kennedy]

This was decidedly a low-budget shop. I think we got a line printer when
we upgraded to the 1130, but I don't really remember.

Yeah, but the 1132, the line printer of the 1130, was essentially a
lobotomized 407, anyway.

 

[John W. Kennedy]

As an aside, I worked at IBM during the transition from the 7000 series
to System\360. There was never a 707, and wouldn't have been because of
the airliner. The 704 was originally called the 703 but someone else
grabbed that number and so IBM moved to 704, forcing the follow-on to
the 702 into 705.

I have heard otherwise, that the 703 was an intended offline tape
sorter/collator that never got to market.

More notes from that period: in addition to FORTRAN, IBM developed a
language called COMTRAN for business programming. It never caught on,
though, mostly because Grace Murray Hopper and Univac and the Feds put
all their weight behind COBOL.

....of which one of the most important sources was Commercial Translator
(as far as I know, "COMTRAN" was never an official name, though it was
widespread).

--
John W. Kennedy
"Those in the seat of power oft forget their failings and seek only the
obeisance of others! Thus is bad government born! Hold in your heart
that you and the people are one, human beings all, and good government
shall arise of its own accord! Such is the path of virtue!"
-- Kazuo Koike. "Lone Wolf and Cub: Thirteen Strings" (tr. Dana Lewis)

 

[Chad Perrin]

Godwin's Law.

Because he mentioned MS Windows . . . ? That's amusing.

 

[Rick DeNatale]

The only plotter IBM ever offered commercially, if I recall aright,
staying in the product line years after the rest of the system had
dropped out.

As I recall, the plotter was a bit of badge-engineering, it was really
from calcomp with an IBM badge. It hooked up to the paper tape punch
interface. You drove it from Fortran-II programs with the "punch
paper tape" command.

At UConn when they installed the plotter on the 1620, the old
paper-tape reader/punch was unused. While I was there some grad
students in the EE/CS department commandeered it and hooked it up to
the department's PDP-8 with the intent of writing a paper-tape
operating system. I don't know that they ever got it fully working
though, IIRC the hitch was trying to come up with some handshaking
mechanism to slow the drive down.

 

[John W. Kennedy]

As I recall, the [IBM 1627] plotter was a bit of badge-engineering, it was really
from calcomp with an IBM badge.

That's always been my impression, though, never having been a plotter
guy, I can't swear to it.

 

[M. Edward (Ed) Borasky]

As I recall, the [IBM 1627] plotter was a bit of badge-engineering, it
was really
from calcomp with an IBM badge.

That's always been my impression, though, never having been a plotter
guy, I can't swear to it.

Yep ... we had one and we even called it the Calcomp Plotter. I wrote
a couple of assembly-language plot routines for it that ran *rings*
around what it could do in FORTRAN.

 

[Damjan Rems]

I know that will reveal my origin, but what the heck
That is *not funny*, well that's why I left

Nc bat. Se vedno brcamo

In Engslish. Don't worry. We are still alive and kicking.

by
TheR

 

[Wolfgang Nádasi-donner]

male 54y
Karlsruhe (Germany)

Systems: CDC-Cyber72, DEC-System10, Telefunken TR440, Siemens 7.760, IBM
370, Vax, DECstation2000/3000, sun workstations (sunOS, later solaris),
PCs (mainly DOS and Windows).

Languages (longer used): Algol60, Fortran, Assembler (several), Teco
programs, Bliss10, BCPL, early Lisps, Mortran, several macro processors,
Snobol4 (very long time), Icon, C, PL/I, C#, Perl5, Python, Ruby

Several other languages, but only for evaluation purposes or for short
time.

...mortran...

The first time I hear "Mortran" since a long time. We adapted Mortran to
the Telefunken TR440 computer around 1980 in the "Grossrechenzentrum für
die Wissenschaft in Berlin" (now "ZIB - Zuse Institut Berlin") as part
of out SAMOS project (Software Adaption and Maintenance Organization
System) and because we were responsible for porting SPSS, SCSS, NAG and
IMSL to German computers. I made several experiments using Mortran as
stand alone macro processor... - unfortunately the Language was real
"write only", much more than Teco programs.

Wolfgang Nádasi-Donner

 

[Pit Capitain]

male 54y
Karlsruhe (Germany)

One more from Germany:

male 46y

First computer: Commodore PET 2001 (1978)
Best computer ever: NeXTcube (1989, still with me)

Languages used at work: Assembler (6502, 680x0), Basic, Visual Basic,
Pascal, Modula-2, PL/SQL, C, C++, Objective-C, Java, Common-Lisp,
Smalltalk, Shell scripting (awk, sed, ...), Perl, Python, Ruby

Currently using PL/SQL, Java and Ruby in my jobs as a freelancer.

Regards,
Pit

 

[Rick DeNatale]

As I recall, the [IBM 1627] plotter was a bit of badge-engineering, it
was really
from calcomp with an IBM badge.

That's always been my impression, though, never having been a plotter
guy, I can't swear to it.

Yep ... we had one and we even called it the Calcomp Plotter. I wrote
a couple of assembly-language plot routines for it that ran *rings*
around what it could do in FORTRAN.

We had a neat little orbital-mechanics game for ours. It drew two
crosses to represent the earth and the moon and started plotting an
earth orbit. You fire thrusters with the sense switches on the
console to fire 'thrusters' to try to go to 'lunar' orbit.

--
Rick DeNatale

My blog on Ruby
http://talklikeaduck.denhaven2.com/

IPMS/USA Region 12 Coordinator
http://ipmsr12.denhaven2.com/

Visit the Project Mercury Wiki Site
http://www.mercuryspacecraft.com/

 

[Kaldrenon]

Yet another male (Maybe YAM will replace YAPH some day? *sigh*)

age: 19

background: BASIC, Visual Basic, the scripting language included in
TI-83 Plus graphing calculators, C++, Java

Presently learning: Perl and Ruby, with plans to learn Lisp, Lua, and
Ada. My goal is to become a true polyglot.

I'm currently enrolled at Rochester Institute of Technology and will
be starting my second year of a Bachelor's in Software Engineering
this fall. I've been interning at a government contractor this summer
doing a lot of grunt work with their file system, which has gotten me
some basic knowledge of regexps and all the nifty low-level stuff Perl
and Ruby offer.

Location: I sort of count double at the moment. I live near
Philadelphia, PA, but I go to college in Rochester, NY.

 

[M. Edward (Ed) Borasky]

Yet another male (Maybe YAM will replace YAPH some day? *sigh*)

age: 19

background: BASIC, Visual Basic, the scripting language included in
TI-83 Plus graphing calculators, C++, Java

Presently learning: Perl and Ruby, with plans to learn Lisp, Lua, and
Ada. My goal is to become a true polyglot.

Unless there's a financial reason, I'd skip Perl and focus on Ruby. And
Scheme is probably a better tutorial language than (Common) Lisp. Check
out "Dr. Scheme", for example.