New subject: 30 6502 book collection on epay...

11 May 2005

  Ah yes, good memories!
At the Technical High School in Heerlen (very southern part of Holland)
our computer class program tasks were written in BEATHE.
I can't remember what the B and E stand for, but the "ATHE" stand for
Algol(60) Technical High school Eindhoven.
The school in Heerlen used at that time (1975 era) IBM 027's (?) to
enter the program on punch *card*. We always had a fight for the few
desks that had a punch that also *printed* the line of Algol on the
top of the punch card. You learned to want to enter your work on such
a desk after your deck of cards had once slipped out of your hands and
fell on the ground ...
You turned in the deck of cards, and one or two days later you got
the print out on green bar paper. In the beginning your program hadn't
even run because the compiler found a missing ";"  Get the correct card,
remove it from the deck and put in the corrected one.  Submit the deck
again, and before you knew a week had passed. Turning in the deck more
than 5 times would seldom produce a good score, so I guess I learned at
that time to be precise.

- Henk, PA8PDP.

...
 >>>> "woodelf" == woodelf 
<bfranchuk at jetnet.ab.ca> writes: 
 woodelf> But remember too you really had only two sized variables,
 woodelf> ints and floating point.  I think the big problem with algol
 woodelf> you never were ment to compile it, just write programns in
 woodelf> it.

...
  Nonsense.  It certainly wasn't designed as a paper
language, and it
 wasn't used as a paper language.  The first compiler (MC Amsterdam, by
 Dijkstra) was a real compiler, and at the T.U. Eindhove the "THE"
 operating system used Algol exclusively, so all the programming for
 many years at that major university was done in Algol 60.

     paul 

Infocom on PDP-11