bad engineers, was Re: NetBSD's i386 support, was Re: Old UNIX Systems

From: geneb Sent: Tuesday, June 04, 2013 8:57 AM I'd never thought about that. Yes, I make (part of) my living as one of the last active PDP-10 programmers in the world, but "I can't NOT write software" strikes a chord I wasn't aware of till you said it. During the years I was at that parochial school in New Haven CT pursuing a graduate degree in linguistics, I had no access to computers. (Not uncommon in 1975.) I read the article on implementing Conway's Life on the Altair in _Popular Electronics_, ran off to the Engineering Library (where they had back issues of _SciAm_), and paid good money to make a xerographic copy Dewdney's columns on the game. I proceeded to write a program to play the game on a 360-architecture computer (my only architecture at the time) in OS/360 BAL, and desk- checked it for correctness of implementation. When I went to Chicago to continue my graduate studies--still in linguistics, mind you--I got a job as the evening help desk at the Comp Center, and typed my program (not particularly bit-efficient, so quite long) into the 370/168. It ran. I started doing Lisp implementation when I worked at Stanford, as well as becoming a TECO programmer for EMACS. I had written a PDP-10 disassembler at Chicago which we used at XKL 20 years later. I have to write software. Damn. Thanks for pointing that out. Rich Alderson Vintage Computing Sr. Systems Engineer Vulcan, Inc. 505 5th Avenue S, Suite 900 Seattle, WA 98104 mailto:RichA at vulcan.com mailto:RichA at LivingComputerMuseum.org http://www.LivingComputerMuseum.org/