26 Feb
2010
26 Feb
'10
10:51 p.m.
I began programming IBM, CDC and Amdahl machines in June 1970. All
assignments at the Computer Institute of Canada were graded according
to the accuracy of the flowchart and the initial box as Chuck states.
COBOL and other languages employed at that time employed gotos; it was
a sign of sloppy programming according to purists and
professors/instructors but gotos usually solved complex junction
problems in an elegant fashion. BASIC and 'Small-C' used them to the
same effect in the microcomputer world of late 70s. Early programming
books are getting scarce yet magazines of that era had programming
projects and got many of us interested
in advanced programming versus machine-language programming; it beat
flipping switches and assembler programming of early to mid-70s
machines!
Murray--