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> This was the future! That’s awesome! :) I didn’t ever work with punch cards, but my very first summer job in the early 90s with a big engineering company th

by mjgs 6y ago

> This was the future! That’s awesome! :) I didn’t ever work with punch cards, but my very first summer job in the early 90s with a big engineering company they were using several main frames. They were huge! Sort of like the WOPR in the film War Games, but less colourful flashing LEDs. It was very corporate atmosphere, everyone wearing suits and ties, there wasn’t much of a sense of it being the future, just the way big engineering companies operated. I never got to program on them, I just got a tour of the server room, so perhaps the atmosphere was different for the programmers. I looked up teletyoes on Wikipedia. They look like an electronic type writer. I can’t imagine the workflow for writing programs on such a device. I guess there was no vim/emacs yet. How did you go about writing a script to parse and process some data on such a device?

KineticLensman 6y ago
The workflow for programming in APL on a teletype was IIRC a bit like using a REPL-based system. APL is a concise language so the programmes we were writing as part of our assignments were only a few lines long. But the bulk of the programming (1980) was on Amdahl and DEC mainframes, in Pascal and sometimes FORTRAN on VT100-type green screen displays, with a bit of COBOL as well. Later C on Vax machines (1982), and in my case Prolog. These all allowed a basic workflow of think-edit-compile-run/debug. All at the command line, with vi for editing on the Vax. I don’t recall the names of the editors on the DEC and Amdahl. What is difficult to appreciate today is the sparsity of the software environment and the lack of tooling beyond editors and compilers and OS utilities. Use of third party libraries was essentially unheard of, at least in the academic environment world I started out in.
- mjgs 6y ago
  Of course! A REPL style interface hadn’t occurred to me. That totally makes sense. I recognise the names of all the machines you mentioned from the Steven Levy Hackers book. I suppose it must have been much slower progress with no internet to read tutorials, no code to read and learn from, I guess only books. I had some time on Mini-computers back in the 80s, I think it was an Olivetti, but there wasn’t much you could do. There was wordperfect and some game were you walked around from room to room, but it was all text based. I didn’t get really into computers until around 2002. It was the web when I got interested in computing, but I was always interested to learn about the scene in previous decades.

by mjgs 6y ago

KineticLensman 6y ago

The workflow for programming in APL on a teletype was IIRC a bit like using a REPL-based system. APL is a concise language so the programmes we were writing as part of our assignments were only a few lines long. But the bulk of the programming (1980) was on Amdahl and DEC mainframes, in Pascal and sometimes FORTRAN on VT100-type green screen displays, with a bit of COBOL as well. Later C on Vax machines (1982), and in my case Prolog. These all allowed a basic workflow of think-edit-compile-run/debug. All at the command line, with vi for editing on the Vax. I don’t recall the names of the editors on the DEC and Amdahl. What is difficult to appreciate today is the sparsity of the software environment and the lack of tooling beyond editors and compilers and OS utilities. Use of third party libraries was essentially unheard of, at least in the academic environment world I started out in.

mjgs 6y ago
Of course! A REPL style interface hadn’t occurred to me. That totally makes sense. I recognise the names of all the machines you mentioned from the Steven Levy Hackers book. I suppose it must have been much slower progress with no internet to read tutorials, no code to read and learn from, I guess only books. I had some time on Mini-computers back in the 80s, I think it was an Olivetti, but there wasn’t much you could do. There was wordperfect and some game were you walked around from room to room, but it was all text based. I didn’t get really into computers until around 2002. It was the web when I got interested in computing, but I was always interested to learn about the scene in previous decades.