3 ms·

For good tones, you had to get down close to "the metal." I recall that there were a few programs like this, but I believe they were written in assembler or mac

For good tones, you had to get down close to "the metal." I recall that there were a few programs like this, but I believe they were written in assembler or machine language so as to control the cpu and bus directly.

mark-r 9y ago
Back then most programming for those machines was done at that level!
- braythwayt 9y ago
  When I first laid eyes on the "High Speed Job Stream" in UofT's Sanford Fleming building (that particular building has since burnt down and been replaced), students were running jobs in PL/1, WATFIV, LISP, SPITBOL, COBOL, and many others. In the labs, there were IBM Selectric terminals dedicated to APL. And there was a BASIC dialect over at what was then "Ryerson Polytechnic." There was a room with terminals and acoustic couplers, no security to keep you out. You need a username and password to use the terminals, but the username and password for each class was posted on a corkboard, so you would write your own programs as long as you didn't get in the way of actual students trying to finish their assignments. I don't doubt that "most" programming was done in assembler, but there was no shortage of higher-level programming going on.
  - mark-r 9y ago
    I said most programming for those particular machines. I agree that mainframes had largely moved on, and probably the larger minis too. My first exposure to programming was time-shared Basic in 1972.
    - braythwayt 9y ago
      You know, I think we've somehow fallen into _violent agreement_ on all subjects.