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I turned 111110 on Feb 8th (born 1944 in the decimal system) What's that in Hexadecimal?When I started my programming career in the 1960's, binary is exactly what we programmed in. But we had a better keyboard, although by modern standards, the keyboard was several times the size of any component of a modern day computer.
I only had to program in binary for a couple of years until we got something called "symbolic" which was where we got to use a single letter for the operation, and could put the binary stuff in field grids, format very much like RPG today, except where RPG has field names, our "fields" were binary strings.
Even though I was writing programs, most of the work was on tabulating equipment, preparing punched card to be fed through the computer. This was before hard disk, where a program was in a compiled object an inch or two thick, and the compiler was several feet thick. We used file cabinet drawers to store our punched cards, 3,000 to a drawer, in which the walk through data base (the file cabinets) dwarfed the walk through computer.
Remember the lights on the panels, which would pop out and could be rearranged? Like that lark of disassembling a 5250 monitor and turning it physically upside down, and reassembling it.
There's people who not know what punched cards are, those wiring boards used on tabulating equipment, or that punched paper tape reel used for printer control. I worked with them all. On one of my first jobs I had to wear a tie, till after the day I walked around the office with it scissored 1/2 way up, with everyone gossiping. I had caught it in the card sorting machine (not intentionally) & fortunately it jammed. When the boss asked if there was any damage, I said only a few hundred cards had to be reassembled. After that, there was no complaints from management when I wore a clip on bow tie.
Dave must be off for the weekend, because he has not reminded us this belongs on a different list.
- Al Macintyre http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:AlMac
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