Posted on 05/23/2017 2:03:47 PM PDT by Kid Shelleen
For the last 30 years, C has been my programming language of choice. As you probably know, C was invented in the early 1970s by Dennis M. Ritchie for the first UNIX kernel and ran on a DEC PDP-11 computer. I am probably a bit old-fashioned. Yes, C is outdated, but I’m simply addicted to it, like plenty of other embedded system programmers. For me, C is a low level but portable language that’s adequate for all my professional and personal projects --SNIP-- And after you’re finished with this review of 1970s-era computing technology, give one or two a try!
(Excerpt) Read more at circuitcellar.com ...
Agreed! I program mostly in Java, and C#, but I still get to do quite a bit of IBM Assembler. I love writing assembler code. People as me if coding in assembler is hard, and I tell them no - as long as you can keep the difference between, L and LA straight!
My head just exploded.
That was such a great post. We used some old layers to keep everything hidden. No more than 4 levels.
You folks that studied and knew the HP was very impressive.
Long gone!!!
Long gone!!!
CDC 6000 assembler was the only fun I ever had over there. It was for a 6400 early 70’s
Back in those days, CRT displays were extremely rare. Teletypes of various kinds were the norm. The dual display shown is an operator's console. The programmers typically submitted jobs on decks of punched cards and got their results from a line printer.
At the University of Colorado, the main operator's console (similar to that shown) was visible through a window in a viewing area. One of the two screens showed which "jobs" the computer was working on at the time and their status. The other screen was probably for operator commands and the associated system responses.
Our system had one "real" graphics display in another part of the comp center that could be used by programmers, which also had a large round CRT. I think it was used only by a couple of specialists and the Colorado highway department, who used it to plan mountain highways.
Still have my original K&R book (Copyright 1978 Bell Labs — NOT the second edition). RIP, Dennis Ritchie.
If you haven’t tried Go yet, pick up the book co-authored by Brian Kernighan (!) and discover the “21st century C”. Best fun I’ve had in YEARS. Of course, considering that two (of the three) inventors of the language happen to be Ken Thompson and Rob Pike, you might figure that it has the same lean, clean approach to language design that us “old farts” came to know and appreciate with C. Enjoy!
What was the deal with the dual round CRT displays? Something on the left was displayed different than on the right? Code / data?
They were vector scopes, not raster. Usually one showed the Dayfile or the Control Points (kinda like Task Nanager on a PC). The other scope was for running console programs like the O20 editor.
One of the PPUs directly controlled the electron gun behind the cathrode ray tube. It was like an Etch-A-Sketch, where each character on the screen was drawn in software one letter at a time.
Since it was vector drawn it could update far faster than any modern screen. Because of that it had some pretty cool games. Oops, I mean demos :-) The original Asteroids arcade game was one of them. There was also a two player Spacewar.
I have mine!
Does anyone here remember WIZ?
Taught C, taught Pascal, taught SQL, taught COBOL until 8 years ago. We fed employees into the insurance industry. Taught QBasic many, many years go. Never officially learned Fortran, but used to help kids taking it to debug their programs. Once you know a few languages, you can figure the rest out.
Now, I teach Python and C++. Gotta stay current :-) This summer, I’m going to lock down Java.
LISP - now that was fun language. Had to pick it up in grad school in he early 90’s o ale a douse in AI. car, car, critter, car
Does assembler from 1982 count? Liked that one too - came back to it when I was doing malware analysis.
C is sill #2 in 2017 - top 5 languages, 3 are C variants.
1) Java
2) C
3) C++
4) C#
5) Python
Former VAX MACRO-32 programmer here.
My K & R second edition is at my left hand. I just used it this morning to find a nifty way to stack ‘case :’ statements in the same line in order to make my switch statement readable. My first edition K & R is at home, retired.
I was just examining a copy of “21st Century C” on a colleagues desk. It does not mention Kernighan as a co-author. It does mention Ben Klemens as the author.
I learned Fortran and iitran (iit) back in 1967.
Wire wrap?
Back in the 1980’s we dragged a prototype processor out of HW qualification in order to strap it to another processor so that we could demo a 2 processor benchmark. This was back in the day when mainframe processors were roughly the size of a refrigerator and composed of several dozen wire wrapped boards of discrete components.
The benchmark services people called me in on Friday evening because the dual processor system would not boot. It would fail on the first page fault generated.
I put an OS master mode breakpoint at the entry to the page fault routine so that I could print out the HW stack frame of the failing page fault. The hardware engineer came over to examine the stack frame where we located the bits in error.
He left to examine his wiring diagrams and came back with his wire wrap gun. A couple of ‘zip’ ‘zip’s later, and we were booting.
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