8 May
2010
8 May
'10
8:18 a.m.
Many excellent points. but in the 80s it wasn't a university using it,
it was a large commercial business
and it still bothers me, what about the computer itself?
also, from what I recall there was only one programming language available,
and that was valtrep. that is certainly odd.
but perhaps in larger scope doesn't totally discount a student project,
though I think the commercial aspect might
I find it deeply disturbing that there seems to be no trace of the computer system
itself.
this list and other places exist in some ways to preserve history of computing.
it seems to suggest there are whole sections of computing history lost, which is not
good.
I don't expect every computer ever built to be documented, but something used at a
university
should have some sort of documentation. though I recognize they also experimented a lot.
so perhaps its not easy to judge if this is a fair expectation.
Dan.
Many languages of the 60's and 70's were
horribly over-specified and
the "full language" in fact had a lot of features that were not desirable.
Some of these were developed at schools as local products that were
never released, and others did become products with a life outside the
school. Others were developed by minicomputer companies because the
"full mainframe language" was not practicable on the mini.
e.g. WATFIV was like FORTRAN but eliminated the separate complie/link/execute
phases and could collapse them. It extended the language in some directions
while collapsing it in others. Later on came RATFOR which went in a
different direction, adding structured elements onto FORTRAN.
e.g. BASIC was supposed to be a simplified version of FORTRAN or ALGOL, but
in fact it was simplified even further into things like PILOT.
e.g. COBOL is, even today, cantankerous but some concepts from it went
into the much streamlined DIBOL. (I hava a sweet spot for DIBOL.)
I think a very important concept, is that having more features in a language,
especially when those features were specified by a committee, results in
an overly complicated overly large cantankerous language. Too bad
most people still get sold on features :-(. It's like the DVD players
with 141 buttons on the remote - people buy it because it has more buttons
or functions, to the point where putting more buttons on becomes a marketing
function, not a usability function.
Tim.
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