Working Daze by John Zakour and Scott Roberts for June 11, 2014

I actually liked Assembly language for the raw power… I am silly.

You’re not silly… at all

Fortran IV could interesting as well but for some reason COBOL and I just never got along. Basic is fun to play with though as is LS-DOS.

When I was in college, I was on a computer system called PLATO. Or, as I like to call it, the Internet Fred Flintstone would’ve used.

I used to program the good ol commodore 64 in machine code 6502, LDA $0f STA $AF60 etc ( ok so i used a compiler called Zoom)

That should be AMC instead of A&E.

I have no idea what they’re talking about

I still have a golf program I wrote on Paper Tape.Kids in college today should have the fun of using Hollerith Cards and then dropping them on the floor. And getting laughed at while you cry because the cards are out of order, and it is the final project.

Remember drum drives? Remember core memory – frite beads strung on a wire matrix? No? Children. Phffft! Probably can’t even do overlays to run a satnav system in 4k. .You know your skills are being left behind when you see the pile of card punch machines and verifiers dumped in the parking lot waiting for the scrap truck.

And you ain’t lived until you trip on the way to the center and fling your stack of finished and checked cards down the hall.

Still, it was a step up from the IBM system with punch panel programming.

I remember going from 8" floppies to 5 1/4" and the time I had getting all my word processing stuff moved over on top of doing regular daily secretarial work.

80s.. I remember turbo basic, quick basic (which also generated executables, but the executable required additional files), turbo pascal (which later became delphy)..there was also the beginning of borland c.. I believe there were enough languages so you did not had to program in assembly

and just to clear out: in the 80s I was a kid, I did not use those programs to connect databases (just to make games for myself or to fool around, my favorite was pascal because of its graphics library), nobody paid me back then to make applications, but if I required to connect databases, I believe it makes way more sense to use a higher level language. I believe in the 80s sql was not totally specified, and the most popular was dbase, which was also a high level script language

Showing my age here, but Pascal was written by Niklaus Wirth.

Whereas Europeans generally pronounce his name the right way (‘Nick-louse Veert’), Americans invariably mangle it into ’Nickel’s Worth.’ This is to say that Europeans call him by name, but Americans call him by value.

I never knew so many nerds read Working Daze – wow, it’s like being part of a family. I’ll just sit here and smile.

I recall the phrase “Halt and Catch Fire” as one of the opcodes from a list of fictional machine commands that used to circulate in hardcopy in the ’70s. That particular command was based on the “Halt and Proceed” or similar commands that existed on small machines of the ’60s or earlier that had no operator console and so communicated with the human operator by displaying a code on the processor panel, then waiting until he (and it was always a he) completed some action (usually to mount a tape), then hit a start button to resume the program.

BTW, I dearly miss processor panel lights. I started with RCA Computers, and RCA had the most beautiful lights of any machine ever. When we brought prospects to the demo center, we would often turn off the computer room lights so they could ooh and ah at the hypnotically rippling orange, gold, and green patterns. (You never wanted to see any of the four red lights. Uh-oh.)

Of all the shows/movies about computers I can remember much about, this one seems marginally more accurate. And BTW, it’s “Halt and Catch Fire”, not “Halt and Catching Fire”.

Haha, I guess I’m in good company here. I did a lot of work in assembler (and sometimes in machine language), 360, PDP-8, PDP-11, Motorola 6800, plus the usual 8086 stuff. Please don’t tell me I’m the only one here with a HP-16C app downloaded on my phone (since I seem to have misplaced the original).

Ah, yes, paper tape, punched cards. Good times.

I worked exclusively on a typewriter back in those early days. Not being an engineer, we couldn’t figure out a use for those giant computers. Of course, it all changed year by year – I went to college with a typewriter and left with a PC. My son still has the Commodore 64 I used somewhere in there.

PDP-10 and XDS Sigma 7 at midnight. 300 baud Datapoint terminals. Charges by the kilo core second. Mount commands for DECtape were a communication to the sysop to put the 9 level mag tape on the drive.