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Programming in 1969: An interview with a pioneer – my mum
- blondin 7y ago> We created the programs, and once they were completed and tested we handed them off. Others were responsible for maintaining them, we just wrote new ones! OMG! when have we stopped doing that?
- hugi 7y agoIf you ever find out, please share. I'd also love to hand most of my code to other people and never see it again.
- moonfern 7y agoStart from a data model you don't understand and use/write objects that force your data into expected results. Make sure everybody involved sees a working version Writing this way is time consuming but ensures nobody including you wants to maintain it or add features.
- jacquesm 7y agoWe never stopped doing that. Only now the people that write the new programs and that don't want to deal with the aftermath of what they've created run off to some new and greener pasture while leaving others to do the dirty work.
- mattrp 7y agoI don’t think that was true everywhere — otherwise we wouldn’t have ended up with the latest modem and pc every few years so dad could support his code in the middle of the night.
- jugg1es 7y agoWow I love this domain name.
- sexisfun 7y agokewl
- sprainedankles 7y ago> The four of us made a dating program where you would input men and women and their traits, and then generate a good matching between them with an algorithm of our own invention. Could this be the very first "dating app"?! Amazing.
- bitwave 7y agoStable matching?
- vasili111 7y agoAny real evidence that dating software was working correctly?
- Koshkin 7y agoNerds.
- jibal 7y ago"Could this be the very first "dating app"?!" Not likely ... this was a common idea among young programmers, and there were several such programs floating around the UCLA Computer Club when I was there in the 60's.
- bklaasen 7y agoNope! This is an area where software, society and gender overlap, so it's been getting a fair bit of attention, most notably by Professor Marie Hicks: https://adanewmedia.org/2016/10/issue10-hicks/ https://adanewmedia.org/2016/10/issue10-hicks/
- bboreham 7y agoSlight eyebrow-raise at “pioneer” - my mum was a programmer in 1956. She tells me they didn’t have enough RAM to fit the whole program in. Nothing changes.
- pvg 7y agoI hope the author pops in to point out that their father knows kung fu and see what you have to say then!
- zanethomas 7y agoSame here, my dad was a programmer of the US Navy's 2nd transistorized computer at KNOTS (Naval Ordinance Test Station, Pasadena, later the Naval Undersea Warfare Center,San Diego) beginning some time between 1955, when we arrive in Pasadena, and 1957 when I first began stacking punch cards and drawing on computer paper. I've been programming since 1975.
- JJMcJ 7y agoOld timers have told me of the "phases". Like load phase 1. Load data cards and start Phase 1. Punch cards are produced with modified data for phase 2. Load phase 2. Load Phase 2 data and start Phase 2. Run Phase 2. There were often even more phases.
- AnimalMuppet 7y agoMy mom was also a programmer in the 1950s. She tells about one CPU where you could use patch cords to change the meaning of the opcodes. My mind boggles.
- noneeeed 7y agoOne of my tutors at uni would get us to do presentations on old papers. I remember one that described a novel very early GUI system. They built the hardware by basically wiring two machines together at the bus level (one was essentially the graphics card), and adding a bunch of additional instructupions using TTL logic chips, it was immensely impressive.
- 7y ago
- tpmx 7y agoAnother computing history story from Sweden: Once when I was young (in the 80s) I found a roll of paper with punched holes in them in our family's home. It turned out that my dad had taken a course in "automatic data management" while studying economics at Lund University, Sweden some time around 1963 or so. A course assignment had been to create a few programs in ALGOL. (I got that part because he had kept the course book.) I spent so much time trying to decode this roll of punched tape. My dad wasn't of much help. He didn't really understand why I was so excited about this. Eventually I managed to decode the roll of paper, probably after getting some kind of character set guide; I don't really remember. I wish I still had this tape of punched paper... I do remember it was really exciting to write out the ALGOL program in clear text as I painstaikingly decoded the punched tape. I was that kid who was really into computing, but so starved of input, in the middle of nowhere. I think his exercises were run on: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BESK https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BESK "BESK (Binär Elektronisk SekvensKalkylator, Swedish for "Binary Electronic Sequence Calculator") was Sweden's first electronic computer, using vacuum tubes instead of relays. It was developed by Matematikmaskinnämnden (Swedish Board for Computing Machinery) and for a short time it was the fastest computer in the world. The computer was completed in 1953 and in use until 1966." or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMIL_(computer) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMIL_(computer)
- pacaro 7y agoI did the same with my mum's stacks of paper tape PL/I programs. At one point I tried to build an automated reader that would interface with my BBC B, but that took me longer than transcribing by hand did. I remember being surprised at the time just how quickly I learned to read papertape, just having the tape in my left hand with my thumb at the current position and writing the character with my right hand, shimmy the tape, next character
- tpmx 7y agoNeat! I was going through this during a few years after I had just gotten a handed down ZX81 from a relative some time around 1984, at the age of 7 or so. I still remember that this relative sold the computer to my parents for 400 SEK (~$40). Pretty good "investment" in my career, I've gotta say. (They also, while not being super well paid as municipal workers also sprung for two more computers for me - one 8086 PC in ~89 and one 80486 PC in ~93. So thankful. These things were so expensive back then, probably at least 1.5x a monthly salary after taxes.)
- Koshkin 7y agoWhat’s interesting is that although the difference between computers of the 1960s and those we have today is greater than the difference between, say, a horse and a fighter jet, the principles of controlling (programming) them are still the same...
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- fishnchips 7y agoDo you mean the difference in power? I still find horses and fighter jets more different than early and modern computers.
- nine_k 7y agoLikely speed and user-visible complexity. A horse has a really basic interface.
- fishnchips 7y agoNot the debugging interface though :)
- Merrill 7y agoPartly because we recapitulated the development from 8 or 16-bit instruction sets three times: 1) mainframe (discrete transistors/tubes and magnetic memory), 2) minicomputer (TTL ICs and solid state memory), and 3) personal computers (microprocessor chips). And then there were dial-up and hard-wired cluster controller networks, various LAN networks, and then internet protocol networks to go along with timesharing, client server, and cloud. Plus ça change....
- jibal 7y agoHorses and fighter jets operate on different principles in different media, whereas computers of the 1960s and today are all based on the von Neumann stored program model. Also, programming today is different in many ways from programming in the 1960s.
- mattrp 7y agoMy dad was recruited out of college to write code. Upon showing up for work, he was told they’d ordered the computer but it wouldn’t arrive for another six months. In the meantime, They’d arranged time on another computer (one of only two in the state) so he’d spend the day writing and then he and another guy would load up their punch cards and drive an hour each night to load the other computer and test the code. At one point they had an intern managing the hundreds of cards representing the software they were writing. They came in one morning and he joyously informed them he had decided it would be better to sort the thousand plus cards by color.
- jibal 7y agoWhat year and what state? I was programming on an IBM 1620 at the local junior college in Van Nuys, California in 1965 while I was still a student at the high school across the street, and there were at least two other IBM 1620's at schools in the San Fernando Valley, and of course numerous computers at banks and other institutions throughout the state.
- kick 7y agoCouldn't it have been basically every state outside of Wisconsin, New York, Massachusetts, Virginia, Connecticut, California, and maybe Illinois in 1965? EDIT: and Texas.
- mattrp 7y ago1968 in North Carolina. I think it was a 360 but I can’t recall exactly. I remember as a kid visiting the office and the computer was housed in a fairly large room where several people worked - mostly women. In fact my mom would joke that the reason he liked work so much was because he worked with virtually all women. It’s possible there were more than two but maybe he was saying only two they could buy time on? I have no idea how many 360s were around back then but that’s how I recall how he told the story.
- jibal 7y ago"maybe he was saying only two they could buy time on?" Probably so. Thanks for filling in the details.
- jmull 7y agoGreat story. My somewhat similar one: In the early ‘50s my mother took the one and only computer class her university offered. At one point a guy from the local defense contractor comes in (!) and essentially offers everyone in the class with a half-decent grade a job at the end of the year. She took them up on it and that’s how she got into computers. She also claims she used to manually bootstrap a computer using toggle switches to initiate a loader and then feed it punch cards (when not in use, kept in a card-catalog cabinet like libraries used to have). I guess I shouldn’t doubt it too much. She did used to bring old (some used!) punch cards home from work for us kids to play with. I suppose they must have been clearing out obsolete equipment and systems.
- madengr 7y agoWhy would you doubt her at all? Bootstrapping with toggle switches, such as in the PDP-11, was quite common. I have a Altair clone kit where it can be done.
- tempguy9999 7y ago> She also claims she used to manually bootstrap a computer using toggle switches to initiate a loader and then feed it punch cards Not implausible, check http://www.pdp-11.nl/peripherals/how-to-bootstrap.html http://www.pdp-11.nl/peripherals/how-to-bootstrap.html for booting a PDP11. I suspect it was before even this as I have never heard of a PDP11 with punched cards. Wasn't IBM the big punched card people? edit: @madengr 0 minutes ago: snap
- earleybird 7y agoI've manually loaded the boot-loader into a PDP-8 in about 1973. Since it had core memory, I'd typically load it as the last thing before leaving so that in the morning I could just load my paper tape and hit run. From a very fuzzy memory, it was about 30, 12bit words in length.
- walshemj 7y agoVery common on DEC PDP systems, more modern ones like the 11/40 and 11/03's I used had a separate sub system that did this for you. Sometimes these broke down and you could manually toggle the initial boot sequence in. Even more common in earlier systems I would imagine
- fishnchips 7y agoTowards the end of the Cold War, my dad was a military man on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain. As a consequence, I was a military brat, attending a "military" preschool. These were tough times, and even paper was at a premium, so one of the parents used to bring lots and lots of printouts that kids could use to draw on the other side. One day it stopped abruptly, and we had no more paper to draw on. Years later I learned that those printouts came from air defense systems, and counterintelligence was involved in our little tragedy.
- einpoklum 7y agoBoth sides of the curtain were the wrong side... for all sorts of reasons. e.g. most the state structure of Nazi Germany just continued to exist undisturbed in post-war West Germany; while in the east the Russians conducted a rather brutal purge/execution campaign.
- fishnchips 7y agoFrankly, by "wrong" I just meant "losing". In the late 1980s, Poland was a dirt poor, sad place.
- fishnchips 7y agoRe: post-war Germany, yeah, I've heard of it. For example, this war criminal [1] was never deported to Poland and was even a successful mayor. Communist propaganda had a field day. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinz_Reinefarth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinz_Reinefarth
- _ph_ 7y agoGerman here. Before the comment gets misunderstood, after WW2 West Germany became a democracy, it was no longer a Nazi state. What the commenter is probably talking about is, that a lot of the administration officials from Nazi Germany would still work in the democratic Germanys administration in various roles. Some of them definitely were Nazis and should not have had a place in any official job, others were just people doing their job under the old and new government.
- dspig 7y agoThe photo of the flowchart template - it must have been the 80s when my mum got one of these and gave it to me, but by then it was in a plastic wrapper rather than a paper one. I guess everyone doing a IBM course got one.
- breck 7y agoThat stencil and the instructions are so cool—so well designed! So clear and concise and useful. Seems like it would still be useful today, ~50 years later. Nice job IBM. Loved this interview.
- einpoklum 7y agoMost striking sentence: > I needed the salary to get my own apartment. Just think that with the starting salary of a non-academically-trained employee (in a desirable position, but still) - you could reasonably buy your own apartment.
- detaro 7y agoI don't think it meant buying an apartment, but being able to rent one on her own.
- jibal 7y agoI too owned that IBM reference card, which I have since scanned and discarded, and I still have that flowchart stencil.
- cpach 7y agoThis sentence made me smile: ”We also used to serve cake on punch cards, so they were quite versatile.” When my dad went to high school in the town of Skövde, Sweden he visited Volvo and they also served cake on punch cards there :)
- wolco 7y agoThese are all great stories. I wonder what everyone is doing now near the end of your careers.
- stevesimmons 7y agoMy mum ran the computing department in the Education Faculty at a university in Australia from 1976. I was 6 years old then and would 'help' her at work during school holidays and sometimes when I was ill. My fond memories included: - Discovering the paper tape machine. - Writing stories on the card punch machine, one line per card. - Pressing buttons on the massive card sorting machine when noone was looking. - Walking to the Computer Centre to pick up the output of my mum's previous day's coding. If she was lucky, there was a thick stack of fanfold paper in her pigeonhole. If not, just a couple of pages with the error message. - Around 1978, playing with her HP RPN calculator. It had an inbuilt reader for programs on small magnetic strips. I typed in the example Moon Lander program from the manual and spent a few hours figuring out how much thrust was needed to land without crashing. - Some time around 1979 they got a computer with a video display and a lightpen. And a 300 baud acoustic coupler.