9 Feb
1999
9 Feb
'99
11:07 a.m.
::Those were the days . . . FORTRAN-II, SCOPE OS,
COMPASS assembler . . .
::batch processing . . . (that meant you wrote your code on a 24-line
::80-column "coding sheet" and, when finished, gave them to a woman behind a
::door with a small window in it . . . and got your error listing a few days
::later) . . . I'd have given a week's pay for an hour in that room behind
::the door . . . mini-skirts . . . (you do remember keypunch operators and
::Hollerith cards, don't you?)
Hah. My father was a Fortran-II programmer. The extent of his error debug
sessions was
ERROR
It took him all semester to do one program, and he was the first in his class.
Reminds me of the FORTRAN on the IBM 1130 (subset FORTRAN IV, no logical IFs,
etc.). Compiler error messages were of the form:
eeee at llll + oooo
where:
eeee = Error code (had to look up in manual)
llll = Last statement label processed
oooo = Offset (cards) past last labelled statement processed
John
(who very much wants to see APL/1130 running on Tony's system)