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I wrote my first "big" program in assembly language (IBM/360): it was a program to print parse trees for an arbitrary grammars. This was around 1970. The clever
by herodotus 4y ago
I wrote my first "big" program in assembly language (IBM/360): it was a program to print parse trees for an arbitrary grammars. This was around 1970. The clever bit was to print in a way that let me tape the printout pages side by side if the tree branches exceeded the 128 (or was it 256?) character limit of the printer.
The IBM printers were fun: you could get them to play simple tunes by printing repeating characters on a line.
- magoghm 4y agoI remember printers with 132 characters per line.
- breck 4y agoDo you still have that program? Would love to read it.
- herodotus 4y agoSorry, no.
- drfuchs 4y agoVery likely your IBM/360 was connected to one of their 1403 Model N1 line printers with 132 columns. The lid would automatically rise up when it was hungry for a new box of fan-folded paper (probably with horizontal green and white stripes, three lines each). To tape your final pages edge-to-edge, you'd have had to have first removed the perforated strips on the left and right edge that had the tractor-feed holes. Fun times.