From: Russ Bartlett
Sent: Tuesday, February 09, 2010 3:44 PM
--- On Tue, 2/9/10, Ethan Dicks <ethan.dicks at
gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 9, 2010 at 4:14 PM, geoffrey oltmans
<oltmansg at bellsouth.net>
> wrote:
>> I wonder how much programmers in the 50's
and 60's argued about how many
>> CPU cycles this programming construct took vs. that. ;)
> Probably a lot. In the earliest days, assemblers
were considered a poor use
> of time on the machine.
The comments are wide of the mark. I started
programming in the 1960's.
On an IBM 360/25 for example, we had 48 KB memory in which to partition F1,
F2, and BG. Larger systems we would run Power II or HASP, GRASP etc. the
spooler would use up memory. Now considering that back then one byte of
memory cost a buck it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that
every little bit counted. We had 11MB disks given that time cost money
(mount/unmount disks), multi volume files etc, and that hardware was
extremely expensive it made a lot of sense to consider every aspect of the
equation:
[ snip ]
Assemblers were NOT considered poor use of machine
time - totally the
reverse. Assembler programmers had to know what they were doing though and
for that I was paid more. It took far less time to assemble a program in
BAL that compile a COBOL program. The down side was it took a lot longer
to write.
I'm pretty sure that Ethan was talking about the attitudes in the mid-1950s,
when assembler languages were born. He is correct that at the time, the use
of assembler languages was controversial, because so much precious computer
time was wasted doing something that any good programmer ought to be able to
do at his desk.
*Every* generation of programmers has *always* looked down on their successors
as using tools that waste too much computer time to do too little. Of course,
*my* generation (started programming in 1969 on a 1401) is right. ;-)
Rich Alderson
Vintage Computing Sr. Server Engineer
Vulcan, Inc.
505 5th Avenue S, Suite 900
Seattle, WA 98104
mailto:RichA at
vulcan.com
mailto:RichA at
LivingComputerMuseum.org
http://www.PDPplanet.org/
http://www.LivingComputerMuseum.org/