12 ms·

When I first entered the working world as a programmer and administrator of an "academic computing center", in the early 70s, you met men like Ray - ex-military

When I first entered the working world as a programmer and administrator of an "academic computing center", in the early 70s, you met men like Ray - ex-military, GI-bill educated, learned computers from the electricity on up in their mid-career, rather frequently, either as customer engineers for one of the big mainframe manufacturers (there were 7 or 8, depending on when and how you counted), or from the minicomputer upstarts who were then assaulting the mainframe world of computing with their smaller, cheaper, 12 and 16 bit newcomers. Sometimes you'd get the privilege of a lunch or dinner with one sent out "from the lab" who was actually designing and building the machines you were working on. It's hard to explain just how new it all felt, then. But in 1973, even though we were sitting on the cusp of the single chip microprocessor and personal computer revolution, the commercial computer was less than 20 years old, and college recruiting materials might well brag that at their institution, there were not one, but two computers on campus. I remember the day the total RAM at our institution passed the megabyte mark - closer to the end, than the beginning, of the 1970s. The ability to "program" was a rare skill - even the people who taught it were still just learning it.

btilly 4y ago
Computers are older than you think. Computers based on integrated circuits were more recent. But the foundations were much older. For example take the punchcard. Punchcards as a way to work with automatic computing devices go back to Hollerith machines and the 1890 census. That was how IBM got started. The phrase "Super Computing machine" dates back to 1931, and referred to a tabulating machine built for Columbia University. Raytheon was producing and selling analog computers starting in the late 1920s. Much of the calculations for the Manhattan project were done by machines - Feynman talks about this in Surely You Must Be Joking, Mr. Feynman. And to give a sense of how much history there is, one of my favorite essays in the 1945 essay, As We May Think, which you can find at https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-may-think/303881/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-m.... It provided the inspiration for both hypertext and the science citation index. The recombining of those ideas in the PageRank patent was the foundation of Google. But how could someone in 1945 understand computing that well? It is simple! Its author was the man who designed those computers Raytheon sold in the 1920s, and among other things was in charge of the development of mechanical computers for the Manhattan Project. (OK, he did a lot more than that...)
- walnutclosefarm 4y ago
  > Computers are older than you think. I doubt it. If by computer you want to mean any machine capable of mechanically doing some kind of calculation, then of course there are examples going back hundreds of years, or even millenia - the Antikythera device was without doubt a mechanical, astronomical computer, for example. But I wrote "the first commercial computer," and the first stored program, Turing complete computing machine that you could actually write a purchase order and be invoiced for, the UNIVAC I, was only produced in 1951. So, I cheated a bit with "less than 20 years old in 1973." It was 22 years old. The point being in terms of my post, that when I started, computers, and programmers, were still very unusual in the employment landscape, and for people like Ray, of the original post, the concept of being a programmer appeared AFTER their formal education in electronics was finished.
  - btilly 4y ago
    There is a distinction between computer and stored program computers, and you're right that the first commercially available stored program computer appeared in 1951. (Though, interestingly, there was a 1936 patent application on the idea in Germany. And a barely functioning one was actually built in 1941.) But Turing complete computers predated that. In fact Turing's own design for a Turing machine was NOT a stored program computer. And you're right that the modern idea of programming postdated stored program computers. But computers are older. As you pointed out, arguably thousands of years older. However I maintain that automatic tabulating machines were on the path to modern computers. Early accounting applications were based on them, as were key parts of the technology used. Like punch cards.
    - walnutclosefarm 4y ago
      I agree that "automatic tabulating machines were on the path to modern computers" were on the path to modern computers. But that does not in any way negate that there was an inflection point in the 1950s and leading into the 1960s that represents the birth of what we mean by the word computer (in English). The machines that I learned programming on in the 1960s were qualitatively different from those things "on the path" to them, but are recognizably the same species of machine as what we work on today - which is to say, they were Von Neumann architecture, Turing complete, off-the-shelf, generally available computers for which one wrote code - not calculators, tabulating machines, or hardware reconfigurable logic engines, and not laboratory experiments aiming toward that. The only thing missing from them that is inherent in our contemporary approach to information is the notion of ubiquitous networking of devices to create a broad and broadly accessible information and calculation landscape. That was still a laboratory project in 1970. Does that matter? Depends on your point of view. What I meant by "how new it all seemed" then tells the tale here. Baruch could maybe see the future in 1945 because of his experience and vision. But by 1970 or thereabouts, almost anyone who touched it could see it, and millions were increasingly able to touch it, precisely because it was was commercially produced and generally available. Still not ubiquitous, as they are today, computers were nevertheless showing up in every corner of life. So it's not that I think computers or information as a processing as a concept, or even as an occasional reality, were new around 1970. But computers as a phenomenon that would define the way interact with each other and the world, and computer programming as a skill that anyone could acquire, really were.
sircastor 4y ago
A few years ago in school I had to read a paper that was written by a guy who happens to also be a part of my local electronics hobby group. I mentioned this to a friend and he noted that, unlike a lot of fields, Computer Science is still young enough that many of the pioneers are still around.
- skeaker 4y ago
  They're often on this very website, in fact.
- tomcam 4y ago
  I worked at Microsoft in the late 90s and methodically went around to all of them, from the creator of MS-DOS to the creator of Turbo Pascal/C#/Typescript, and asked them all the questions that I couldn't find in the computer history books.
  - robterrell 4y ago
    Would love to read these if you've collected them somewhere.
    - tomcam 4y ago
      Never really wrote about it!
  - TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
    Where can we read it?
    - tomcam 4y ago
      I didn’t take notes or anything and many of my questions were very specific. For example, how did Turbo Pascal do error handling (easily, because it was a handwritten recursive descent compiler), or did Tim Paterson, who sold DOS to Bill Gates for $50,000, ever regret it (no).
shafoshaf 4y ago
It reminds me of "Mel"in 1983 which was in response to "Real Programmers write in FORTRAN." https://www.cs.utah.edu/~elb/folklore/mel.html https://www.cs.utah.edu/~elb/folklore/mel.html
- notfish 4y ago
  Which is, of course, included as “The story of Mel” in the jargon file: http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/ http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/
  - still_grokking 4y ago
    I was fascinated by this story as teenager. But looking back on it, I would say out of my current perspective this Mel guy was not a genius, but one of the worst programmers you could probably hire: He written unmaintainable and even unchangeable "write-once" code that was so complex that nobody else could handle it either. He refused to do what he was payed for and just went away as he lost interest. One of this kind of dudes on your engineering team and your company is in real deep trouble… It's a given that you will need to throw away everything they did and start form scratch should any changes be necessary later on. However there's one fundamental constant in software engineering: Your software is going to need to change over time! No mater whatever somebody told you upfront. So in case you've got software built by some "Mel" you're completely screwed at that point, especially as changes to SW are usually needed the most at some critical period in time for your company.
    - alar44 4y ago
      Nah, those were different times when bits and bytes mattered. Everything was written in assembly/,machine code. Mel's tricks were just how things were done back then. There was no repo, code didn't need to be maintained or added onto. The lifecycle of software was much much shorter.
      - still_grokking 4y ago
        > Nah, those were different times when bits and bytes mattered. Obviously not. We're talking about mundane business software. Also the "optimizing compiler" that couldn't reach such levels of "perfection" wouldn't be a thing if this would really matter. > Mel's tricks were just how things were done back then. Obviously not. Otherwise there wouldn't be any point in this story. It points out, with a lot emphasis, how exceptional Mel's code was! > There was no repo, code didn't need to be maintained or added onto. VCS dates back quite some time… Also maintaining code was of course not any less important for a company as it is today. Simply as companies back than also relayed on their software to operate. > The lifecycle of software was much much shorter. No, of course not, as nobody would throw away some very expensive asset for no reason. If anything, lifecycles of software were much longer than today (when you can deploy changes every few minutes if you please). Stuff written in the 70's is still running on some mainframes today! As changing software was much more dangerous with much higher risk of breakage, less experts around, and everything much more difficult in general, it was more usual to try to not touch an already running system. (Maybe you even heard some quite similar proverb coined back than ;-)). But "not touching" it does not work, as there is only one truly constant thing: Change.
acjacobson 4y ago
My grandfather was like this. Full stint in the Marines and then worked on computers. I remember him telling the story of how exciting it was (and what a big deal it was) when one of their systems got upgraded to 4k of RAM.
drummer 4y ago
> even the people who taught it were still just learning it. Still true today.
- still_grokking 4y ago
  And this will likely never change as the most skilled people land eventually in leadership positions or become entrepreneurs. By the day we didn't even invent some best practices or std. tools everybody in the field would agree on. CS is still like electrical engineering around 1850. ;-)
marcodiego 4y ago
My father was a physicist. He learned to program in FORTRAN in the university in the 70's. Decades later I, still a teenager, asked him something like this: "Dad, you were a FORTRAN programmer and physicist in the 70's, you could be a very well paid developer anywhere in the developed world... why didn't you?"; he answered me: "I didn't thought this thing about computers would go too far."
- jimt1234 4y ago
  My grandpa told me the same thing; he didn't think computers were gonna last. Not sure of exact time, but I think it was late-60s-to-early-70s; Gramps was a business professor at a major university in the Midwest. A team of math nerds started working on this new thing called a "computer". He said it was almost the size of a basketball gymnasium, it took weeks to get the thing set up, and was always breaking. In the end, it could only do simple calculations. He said the university viewed the project as pretty much a failure. So, Gramps, the futurist, told all his business students not to get involved with computers, there was no future in them. Good job, Gramps. He later told me his big hope was that none of his students listened to a word he said. LOL
- pastage 4y ago
  One have to understand the social factors as well. It was womens job in the beginning, the stigma of being seen as a female computers was most probably what made it unattractive and tediuos to many men at the time. Many highly placed engineering bosses in programming were women for a long time because those where the people who had experience. See Margret Hamilton of Apollo, and also some of the pioneers in cellphone "software".
- hilbert42 4y ago
  "Dad, you were a FORTRAN programmer and physicist in the 70's, you could be a very well paid developer anywhere in the developed world... why didn't you?"..." I'd suggest there is likely another reason, and if your father didn't actively think about it he probably understood it subliminally. Back then, programming was part of mathematics at many universities and, like it or not, everyone doing science and engineering had to study the subject—and for many universities that was Fortran. Fortran was essential part of the background culture: if one was doing mathematics or any of the physical sciences, Fortran was just there—thus, one didn't see it as special or exceptional. I had no option but to study it but I didn't see that as an imposition—diehards like me were regularly chucked out of the punch card room by the university security guards last thing at night when the joint closed. Moreover, at my university the Fortran lecturer also wrote the Fortran textbook (well, the ones we used at least), so there was no leniency or excuse: Introduction to FORTRAN IV programming using the watfor compiler - 1968 & 1971 and Basic FORTRAN IV programming (version IBM 360), 1969—by John M Blatt: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_M._Blatt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_M._Blatt. As I found out later there were better textbooks on the subject and Blatt was a didactic forceful character without much charisma, so his lectures were somewhat painful. However, comic relief was not that infrequent. We had Fortran lectures in a large hall which had an upper circle like a picture theater, a certain fraternity would frequent the circle and aim paper airplanes at him when he was facing the blackboard much to his chagrin. No, I wasn't one of the guilty but I fully enjoyed the spectacle.
tabtab 4y ago
> college recruiting materials might well brag that at their institution, there were not one, but two computers on campus. Our community college highlighted their Vax minicomputer by having a special window that showed all the flashing LED's to passers by. But when PC's became the "in thing", they felt embarrassed and covered the window with PC posters. Poor Vax, lots of memories together. It was an early lesson in IT = star-today-washup-tomorrow.
- walnutclosefarm 4y ago
  We had one of the first class of HP3000 minicomputers, which was both highly advanced, with it's stack architecture and variable length memory segmentation, but also very disappointing. But on the flashing lights front, the first design class did not disappoint (see console in upper right quadrant - lots of LEDS - which were new and only red in those days - and paddle switches): http://www.hpmuseum.net/images/3000_2615A_1973-25.jpg http://www.hpmuseum.net/images/3000_2615A_1973-25.jpg
tomcam 4y ago
Also many of those guys were EEs who had no degrees. They always seemed cheerful and happy with their jobs. It was one of the things that inspired me to teach myself programming.
pensievelogsfir 4y ago
11/10! Gracias for sharing !

btilly 4y ago

Computers are older than you think. Computers based on integrated circuits were more recent. But the foundations were much older. For example take the punchcard. Punchcards as a way to work with automatic computing devices go back to Hollerith machines and the 1890 census. That was how IBM got started. The phrase "Super Computing machine" dates back to 1931, and referred to a tabulating machine built for Columbia University. Raytheon was producing and selling analog computers starting in the late 1920s. Much of the calculations for the Manhattan project were done by machines - Feynman talks about this in Surely You Must Be Joking, Mr. Feynman. And to give a sense of how much history there is, one of my favorite essays in the 1945 essay, As We May Think, which you can find at https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-may-think/303881/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-m.... It provided the inspiration for both hypertext and the science citation index. The recombining of those ideas in the PageRank patent was the foundation of Google. But how could someone in 1945 understand computing that well? It is simple! Its author was the man who designed those computers Raytheon sold in the 1920s, and among other things was in charge of the development of mechanical computers for the Manhattan Project. (OK, he did a lot more than that...)

walnutclosefarm 4y ago
> Computers are older than you think. I doubt it. If by computer you want to mean any machine capable of mechanically doing some kind of calculation, then of course there are examples going back hundreds of years, or even millenia - the Antikythera device was without doubt a mechanical, astronomical computer, for example. But I wrote "the first commercial computer," and the first stored program, Turing complete computing machine that you could actually write a purchase order and be invoiced for, the UNIVAC I, was only produced in 1951. So, I cheated a bit with "less than 20 years old in 1973." It was 22 years old. The point being in terms of my post, that when I started, computers, and programmers, were still very unusual in the employment landscape, and for people like Ray, of the original post, the concept of being a programmer appeared AFTER their formal education in electronics was finished.
- btilly 4y ago
  There is a distinction between computer and stored program computers, and you're right that the first commercially available stored program computer appeared in 1951. (Though, interestingly, there was a 1936 patent application on the idea in Germany. And a barely functioning one was actually built in 1941.) But Turing complete computers predated that. In fact Turing's own design for a Turing machine was NOT a stored program computer. And you're right that the modern idea of programming postdated stored program computers. But computers are older. As you pointed out, arguably thousands of years older. However I maintain that automatic tabulating machines were on the path to modern computers. Early accounting applications were based on them, as were key parts of the technology used. Like punch cards.
  - walnutclosefarm 4y ago
    I agree that "automatic tabulating machines were on the path to modern computers" were on the path to modern computers. But that does not in any way negate that there was an inflection point in the 1950s and leading into the 1960s that represents the birth of what we mean by the word computer (in English). The machines that I learned programming on in the 1960s were qualitatively different from those things "on the path" to them, but are recognizably the same species of machine as what we work on today - which is to say, they were Von Neumann architecture, Turing complete, off-the-shelf, generally available computers for which one wrote code - not calculators, tabulating machines, or hardware reconfigurable logic engines, and not laboratory experiments aiming toward that. The only thing missing from them that is inherent in our contemporary approach to information is the notion of ubiquitous networking of devices to create a broad and broadly accessible information and calculation landscape. That was still a laboratory project in 1970. Does that matter? Depends on your point of view. What I meant by "how new it all seemed" then tells the tale here. Baruch could maybe see the future in 1945 because of his experience and vision. But by 1970 or thereabouts, almost anyone who touched it could see it, and millions were increasingly able to touch it, precisely because it was was commercially produced and generally available. Still not ubiquitous, as they are today, computers were nevertheless showing up in every corner of life. So it's not that I think computers or information as a processing as a concept, or even as an occasional reality, were new around 1970. But computers as a phenomenon that would define the way interact with each other and the world, and computer programming as a skill that anyone could acquire, really were.

sircastor 4y ago

A few years ago in school I had to read a paper that was written by a guy who happens to also be a part of my local electronics hobby group. I mentioned this to a friend and he noted that, unlike a lot of fields, Computer Science is still young enough that many of the pioneers are still around.

skeaker 4y ago
They're often on this very website, in fact.
tomcam 4y ago
I worked at Microsoft in the late 90s and methodically went around to all of them, from the creator of MS-DOS to the creator of Turbo Pascal/C#/Typescript, and asked them all the questions that I couldn't find in the computer history books.
- robterrell 4y ago
  Would love to read these if you've collected them somewhere.
  - tomcam 4y ago
    Never really wrote about it!
- TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
  Where can we read it?
  - tomcam 4y ago
    I didn’t take notes or anything and many of my questions were very specific. For example, how did Turbo Pascal do error handling (easily, because it was a handwritten recursive descent compiler), or did Tim Paterson, who sold DOS to Bill Gates for $50,000, ever regret it (no).

shafoshaf 4y ago

It reminds me of "Mel"in 1983 which was in response to "Real Programmers write in FORTRAN." https://www.cs.utah.edu/~elb/folklore/mel.html https://www.cs.utah.edu/~elb/folklore/mel.html

notfish 4y ago
Which is, of course, included as “The story of Mel” in the jargon file: http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/ http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/
- still_grokking 4y ago
  I was fascinated by this story as teenager. But looking back on it, I would say out of my current perspective this Mel guy was not a genius, but one of the worst programmers you could probably hire: He written unmaintainable and even unchangeable "write-once" code that was so complex that nobody else could handle it either. He refused to do what he was payed for and just went away as he lost interest. One of this kind of dudes on your engineering team and your company is in real deep trouble… It's a given that you will need to throw away everything they did and start form scratch should any changes be necessary later on. However there's one fundamental constant in software engineering: Your software is going to need to change over time! No mater whatever somebody told you upfront. So in case you've got software built by some "Mel" you're completely screwed at that point, especially as changes to SW are usually needed the most at some critical period in time for your company.
  - alar44 4y ago
    Nah, those were different times when bits and bytes mattered. Everything was written in assembly/,machine code. Mel's tricks were just how things were done back then. There was no repo, code didn't need to be maintained or added onto. The lifecycle of software was much much shorter.
    - still_grokking 4y ago
      > Nah, those were different times when bits and bytes mattered. Obviously not. We're talking about mundane business software. Also the "optimizing compiler" that couldn't reach such levels of "perfection" wouldn't be a thing if this would really matter. > Mel's tricks were just how things were done back then. Obviously not. Otherwise there wouldn't be any point in this story. It points out, with a lot emphasis, how exceptional Mel's code was! > There was no repo, code didn't need to be maintained or added onto. VCS dates back quite some time… Also maintaining code was of course not any less important for a company as it is today. Simply as companies back than also relayed on their software to operate. > The lifecycle of software was much much shorter. No, of course not, as nobody would throw away some very expensive asset for no reason. If anything, lifecycles of software were much longer than today (when you can deploy changes every few minutes if you please). Stuff written in the 70's is still running on some mainframes today! As changing software was much more dangerous with much higher risk of breakage, less experts around, and everything much more difficult in general, it was more usual to try to not touch an already running system. (Maybe you even heard some quite similar proverb coined back than ;-)). But "not touching" it does not work, as there is only one truly constant thing: Change.

acjacobson 4y ago

My grandfather was like this. Full stint in the Marines and then worked on computers. I remember him telling the story of how exciting it was (and what a big deal it was) when one of their systems got upgraded to 4k of RAM.

drummer 4y ago

> even the people who taught it were still just learning it. Still true today.

still_grokking 4y ago
And this will likely never change as the most skilled people land eventually in leadership positions or become entrepreneurs. By the day we didn't even invent some best practices or std. tools everybody in the field would agree on. CS is still like electrical engineering around 1850. ;-)

marcodiego 4y ago

My father was a physicist. He learned to program in FORTRAN in the university in the 70's. Decades later I, still a teenager, asked him something like this: "Dad, you were a FORTRAN programmer and physicist in the 70's, you could be a very well paid developer anywhere in the developed world... why didn't you?"; he answered me: "I didn't thought this thing about computers would go too far."

jimt1234 4y ago
My grandpa told me the same thing; he didn't think computers were gonna last. Not sure of exact time, but I think it was late-60s-to-early-70s; Gramps was a business professor at a major university in the Midwest. A team of math nerds started working on this new thing called a "computer". He said it was almost the size of a basketball gymnasium, it took weeks to get the thing set up, and was always breaking. In the end, it could only do simple calculations. He said the university viewed the project as pretty much a failure. So, Gramps, the futurist, told all his business students not to get involved with computers, there was no future in them. Good job, Gramps. He later told me his big hope was that none of his students listened to a word he said. LOL
pastage 4y ago
One have to understand the social factors as well. It was womens job in the beginning, the stigma of being seen as a female computers was most probably what made it unattractive and tediuos to many men at the time. Many highly placed engineering bosses in programming were women for a long time because those where the people who had experience. See Margret Hamilton of Apollo, and also some of the pioneers in cellphone "software".
hilbert42 4y ago
"Dad, you were a FORTRAN programmer and physicist in the 70's, you could be a very well paid developer anywhere in the developed world... why didn't you?"..." I'd suggest there is likely another reason, and if your father didn't actively think about it he probably understood it subliminally. Back then, programming was part of mathematics at many universities and, like it or not, everyone doing science and engineering had to study the subject—and for many universities that was Fortran. Fortran was essential part of the background culture: if one was doing mathematics or any of the physical sciences, Fortran was just there—thus, one didn't see it as special or exceptional. I had no option but to study it but I didn't see that as an imposition—diehards like me were regularly chucked out of the punch card room by the university security guards last thing at night when the joint closed. Moreover, at my university the Fortran lecturer also wrote the Fortran textbook (well, the ones we used at least), so there was no leniency or excuse: Introduction to FORTRAN IV programming using the watfor compiler - 1968 & 1971 and Basic FORTRAN IV programming (version IBM 360), 1969—by John M Blatt: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_M._Blatt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_M._Blatt. As I found out later there were better textbooks on the subject and Blatt was a didactic forceful character without much charisma, so his lectures were somewhat painful. However, comic relief was not that infrequent. We had Fortran lectures in a large hall which had an upper circle like a picture theater, a certain fraternity would frequent the circle and aim paper airplanes at him when he was facing the blackboard much to his chagrin. No, I wasn't one of the guilty but I fully enjoyed the spectacle.

tabtab 4y ago

> college recruiting materials might well brag that at their institution, there were not one, but two computers on campus. Our community college highlighted their Vax minicomputer by having a special window that showed all the flashing LED's to passers by. But when PC's became the "in thing", they felt embarrassed and covered the window with PC posters. Poor Vax, lots of memories together. It was an early lesson in IT = star-today-washup-tomorrow.

walnutclosefarm 4y ago
We had one of the first class of HP3000 minicomputers, which was both highly advanced, with it's stack architecture and variable length memory segmentation, but also very disappointing. But on the flashing lights front, the first design class did not disappoint (see console in upper right quadrant - lots of LEDS - which were new and only red in those days - and paddle switches): http://www.hpmuseum.net/images/3000_2615A_1973-25.jpg http://www.hpmuseum.net/images/3000_2615A_1973-25.jpg

tomcam 4y ago

Also many of those guys were EEs who had no degrees. They always seemed cheerful and happy with their jobs. It was one of the things that inspired me to teach myself programming.

pensievelogsfir 4y ago

11/10! Gracias for sharing !