Re: Fun on Friday.....For all the older programmers on the list

I first realized I had a talent for programming on a System/370

http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/mainframe/mainframe_PP3145.html

the semester before my first, they did away with punch cards
(woohoo!!!!), so I never had to mess with them.  but we write our
programs on paper and had to schedule time on one of the 3 terminals,
so bench checking your work was essential.

I cut my teeth professionally on an S/34, in a small custom software
house.  Our clients would order the box ahead of time, but not accept
delivery for months while we designed and wrote their systems.  The
purchase gave them 100 hours or so at the IBM data center downtown for
development and testing, so we had an S/23 datamaster
( http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/pc/pc_9.html )
that we wrote a basic program to allow us to key in our RPG source
code, so we could go to IBM and immediately load the programs, compile
and start testing.

The day we got a small S/36 in house, we felt like we'd really made it.

ah, those weren't the days....

On 2/10/06, Bruce Barrett <bruce.barrett@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> I too did the unit record equipment.  But I learned FORTRAN programming
> for this puppy.
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_1401
>
> Bruce Barrett
>
> This e-mail is confidential and may be privileged. If you are not the
> intended recipient, please destroy this message and notify the sender.
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx
> [mailto:midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Doug Hart
> Sent: Friday, February 10, 2006 3:24 PM
> To: 'Midrange Systems Technical Discussion'
> Subject: RE: Fun on Friday.....For all the older programmers on the list
>
>
> 38 years ago I worked on these
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_record_equipment .
> My 1st computer was an IBM 360/20, can't remember if it had any disk.
> My 1st language was Basic Assembler Language (BAL) and then Fortran.
> First RPG didn't have any Roman numerals or arrays or direct file
> processing.
>
> 1st mainframe was from Burrows and used that oily yellow punched paper
> tape.
>
> And I know I'm not the oldest on this list.
>
> --
> Doug Hart