Posted on 07/06/2015 3:51:37 AM PDT by markomalley
I had an IBM-PC so early it still came with the (never used) cassette port for mass storage. 16K soldered to the motherboard, DIP sockets for adding 3 rows of 16k chips to get you all the way to a whopping 64K!
And yes, I realize this is nothing in the way of early computers.
I used the PC’s interpreted BASIC to do a graduate level engineering numerical methods class. It kept me from having to drive down to the computer center, where I could have used FORTRAN on the CDC Cyber. The PC was slow, but I’d get things set up and running, and then let it run overnight to converge to a solution. It beat getting in a car!
Technically, I think they were PR1ME, not PRIME.
;-P
Oy vey!
You mean Java forever baby, since .NET does allow for manually managed memory headaches as well:
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.runtime.interopservices.marshal.allochglobal.aspx
Allows for.
No one should need to do that.
I learned FORTRAN in university in 1990 when I was still in engineering school. I hated the textbook and the instructor was useless, so I bought the Watcom FORTRAN reference manual and taught myself, showing up in class only long enough to get the weekly assignments.
I was in the mechanical engineering department. I wish I had had the option of learning C instead, like the electrical engineers did. I would have had use for it later in life. Never had a need for FORTRAN again.
I am with you there !
Ah, a kindred soul. I, too, learned FORTRAN II on an IBM 1620 in college. After graduation I programmed FORTRAN IV on an IBM DCS (direct coupled system) which was a 7094 running as a slave to a 7044 which handled the card readers, punches, line printers and tape drives. All mass storage was on 800 bpi magnetic tapes. No, friends, disc drives were no where to be found.
The 7094 had 36k words (36 bits/word) and the code was in BCD. Not much power for a several million dollar set of cabinets that filled a room and ate A/C.
Mine was FORTRAN 4 (77?) on an HP9000, happily I moved on to C about a year later. C was (is) a great programming language. I like Java too but I always remember that "strong typing is for weak minds", lol, C let me get down and dirty with data stacks that would cause a Java compilers to self dis-struck.
Cool!
in about 1960 I had two computer courses in engineering school - an elective and a required course.The elective? FORTRAN.
The required course? Analog computation.
Now we’re getting nostalgic.
Fortan 77 was my 2nd language.
Ah, that's very cool. Granted, they're not used widely these days, but they still have applications.
I never got to take an analog computation course, having entered college in 1970.
But in 1979 I was designing a variable-speed/variable-voltage 3-phase inverter for induction motors in the 5-20HP range. The heart of the control system was an integrator/differentiator stage with second-derivative feedback. It had to operate very smoothly with high precision to ensure system stability. The microprocessors of that time weren't fast enough at precision math to make the control scheme work. So after the initial calculations, the uP drove a D/A converter to feed a three-op-amp analog computer that implemented the integrator/differentiator stage. The output of the I/D stage was A/D converted back to continue the digital control algorithm. Worked quite well, and had the additional advantage that we could hang a scope probe on the I/D op-amp pins to see what was going on during debug.
Have you ever used one of these modern PCs to run software without Microsoft bloatware? Using an old DOS sort, which is pretty crude, I sorted a file containing two million movie titles/descriptions in under six seconds. I thought the process blew up until I saw the output file.
I’ve got to take the kiddies shooting soon, before July expires.
In 1978, we were using Fortran, which was not fun, but by far the greater hassle was fighting 16-bit address space on the DG Nova 1200.
July does not expire. It perspires.
The language you learn is irrelevant. The point is that you learned a language. I’ve coded systems in almost 2 dozen languages over 30 years. I’m not an expert in any of them but I can write programs in all of them.
I still have to dabble in COBOL and C because we have legacy code in them but I also write in Groovy/Grails because we are writing a new system in it.
No wonder I drink so much.
cool. Granted, they're not used widely these days, but they still have applications.The required course? Analog computation.
Yep. There was a nice little (80 potentiometers, IIRC) analog computer in the ground station, and the operator was always glad to see me because there weren’t too many of us who would come up with uses for it.Ah, to think what I coulda done with that if I’d had any inkling of Chaos Theory back then!
Nothing practical, of course . . . but all it would have taken was a little curiosity and you coulda’ written a paper on nonlinear system behavior that would have been cited quite a bit.
C is, and always will be, king of embedded programming. It is by far my favorite language. Like yourself, I have used quite a number of computer languages. I have even written in assembler for many processors, starting with the IBM 1130 and 360 series. Minicomputers were a blast, with the PDP-11 being the pick of the litter. The 68000 micro was like a super-set of the PDP-11.
Ah, the old days.
FORTRAN was the first language I learned, but assembler was the first for which I was employed.
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