9 Feb
1999
9 Feb
'99
10:47 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.
Fortran II was great.
Anyways, the best compiler ever written was MNF. Minnesota Fortran. You
had to love the post mortem dumps. It was a breeze debugging college
students computer programs, they would come up to your desk with a
printed listing and run of the program, and you would point at the
post mortem dump and basically repeat to the student exactly what
was printed, while simultaneously pointing at the output.. "hmm, says
here it stopped on line XXX, in subroutine YYY, and this is what the
variables were at that time, so, what was your question again?"
-Lawrence LeMay