4 ms·

Thanks for the clarification. I changed schools a few times growing up and "missed out" on some actual courses called "prealgebra" and "precalculus", which lea

Thanks for the clarification. I changed schools a few times growing up and "missed out" on some actual courses called "prealgebra" and "precalculus", which lead to my assumption. I think what really helped me pick up different branches of math was actually getting the motivation from somewhere. My learning of Discrete Math was fueled by my interest in programming; for Calculus it was the neat applications in Physics. Calculating for calculation's sake was always pretty boring, and I'd tune out without some other kind of applicable motivation. By the sounds of it, I'm much younger than you (having attended high school in the mid-2000s), but it's interesting that I did pretty similar stuff when I was bored in school. I wrote more than a couple of essays using groff just for the hell of it. Good times :)

hga 12y ago
You're very welcome, and indeed, back in my days, late '70s for high school, not only did we have to walk uphill both ways in snow to get there, but the computer programming course was taught in conjunction with the local college, probably the same course they used. It was punched card FORTRAN "IV" on an IBM 1130 (scare quotes because IBM's definition of FORTRAN IV was so permissive this compiler only have numeric ifs; that is, an if statement evaluated an expression and it had three lines it would goto if negative, 0 or positive). It wasn't as bad as it might sound; sure, punched cards were a bit of a pain, and we all knew they were obsolescent (1978-9), but then again it was a chance to learn how they did things when dinosaurs roamed the earth. But the neatest thing was no computer priesthood for this class: the main computer for the school was an 370/115 (360 series: revolutionary '60s architecture using discrete silicon transistors and core memory, the 370 series used ICs including for main memory (!), the -115 model was the lowest end/slowest, but it ran BASIC fine :-), and they leased the obsolescent 1130 and just put it in a corner. We'd put our cards in the card reader, hit go, hit the right buttons or whatever to break it out of an infinite loop if necessary, feed in a boot card if it got really confused, all under essentially no supervision, but good help, of the priesthood in the other corner of the room tending the mainframe. It also had a console, and an interactive program was one of the projects. Lots of people older than me also cut their teeth on the 1130, Wikipedia has a partial list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_1130#Influence_of_the_1130 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_1130#Influence_of_the_1130 I wonder, if only the university library had a book on LISP; instead it had lots of good books on software engineering, which along with the programming taught me the basics. Like don't mix up '0' and 'O' in your variable names, especially if the first cut of the card deck is being produced by students learning how to do date entry from a coding form you filled out (http://www.atkielski.com/PDF/data/fortran.pdf http://www.atkielski.com/PDF/data/fortran.pdf). Whereas the DEC PDP-11/70 running UNIX(TM) I used was at a big university's summer school following that. And fortunately not at all loaded down then, and it was a very fast system, even had a fixed head disk for swapping. So in my case I was semi-bored with the introductory programming course (at the end the professor privately but nicely called me out for being a ringer), and wrote up the final project using nroff and a XEROX Daisywheel to counter that. Just because even primitive word processing that was extremely neat, and a lot better than typing out a paper in the previous summer on a Selectric typewriter with auto-erase, the best there was at the time.
- groovy2shoes 12y ago
  Interesting story. I always enjoy reading about the history of our field :) P.S. I contend that {n,t,g}roff is still a lot better than typing out a paper in MS Word, though I mostly stick to LaTeX for that sort of stuff nowadays.

hga 12y ago

You're very welcome, and indeed, back in my days, late '70s for high school, not only did we have to walk uphill both ways in snow to get there, but the computer programming course was taught in conjunction with the local college, probably the same course they used. It was punched card FORTRAN "IV" on an IBM 1130 (scare quotes because IBM's definition of FORTRAN IV was so permissive this compiler only have numeric ifs; that is, an if statement evaluated an expression and it had three lines it would goto if negative, 0 or positive). It wasn't as bad as it might sound; sure, punched cards were a bit of a pain, and we all knew they were obsolescent (1978-9), but then again it was a chance to learn how they did things when dinosaurs roamed the earth. But the neatest thing was no computer priesthood for this class: the main computer for the school was an 370/115 (360 series: revolutionary '60s architecture using discrete silicon transistors and core memory, the 370 series used ICs including for main memory (!), the -115 model was the lowest end/slowest, but it ran BASIC fine :-), and they leased the obsolescent 1130 and just put it in a corner. We'd put our cards in the card reader, hit go, hit the right buttons or whatever to break it out of an infinite loop if necessary, feed in a boot card if it got really confused, all under essentially no supervision, but good help, of the priesthood in the other corner of the room tending the mainframe. It also had a console, and an interactive program was one of the projects. Lots of people older than me also cut their teeth on the 1130, Wikipedia has a partial list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_1130#Influence_of_the_1130 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_1130#Influence_of_the_1130 I wonder, if only the university library had a book on LISP; instead it had lots of good books on software engineering, which along with the programming taught me the basics. Like don't mix up '0' and 'O' in your variable names, especially if the first cut of the card deck is being produced by students learning how to do date entry from a coding form you filled out (http://www.atkielski.com/PDF/data/fortran.pdf http://www.atkielski.com/PDF/data/fortran.pdf). Whereas the DEC PDP-11/70 running UNIX(TM) I used was at a big university's summer school following that. And fortunately not at all loaded down then, and it was a very fast system, even had a fixed head disk for swapping. So in my case I was semi-bored with the introductory programming course (at the end the professor privately but nicely called me out for being a ringer), and wrote up the final project using nroff and a XEROX Daisywheel to counter that. Just because even primitive word processing that was extremely neat, and a lot better than typing out a paper in the previous summer on a Selectric typewriter with auto-erase, the best there was at the time.

groovy2shoes 12y ago
Interesting story. I always enjoy reading about the history of our field :) P.S. I contend that {n,t,g}roff is still a lot better than typing out a paper in MS Word, though I mostly stick to LaTeX for that sort of stuff nowadays.