Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!cs.utexas.edu!ut-emx!nather From: nather@ut-emx.uucp (Ed Nather) Newsgroups: comp.misc Subject: Re: MEL - A *Real* Programmer Keywords: Real Programmer, Hacker Message-ID: <38858@ut-emx.uucp> Date: 29 Oct 90 16:22:12 GMT References: <7380.271c3129@ccvax.ucd.ie> <1990Oct23.235720.16178@nas.nasa.gov> <9402@orca.wv.tek.com> Distribution: usa Organization: The University of Texas at Austin; Austin, Texas Lines: 50 In article <9402@orca.wv.tek.com>, alanj@nevermore.WV.TEK.COM (Alan Jeddeloh;685-2991;61-201;292-9740;orca) writes: > > > Ah, you young wipper-snappers just don't understand how it *was* back then! > > You have to realize that early computers measured their cycle times in > microseconds, not nanoseconds, and their memory in kilobytes, not megabytes. > Some of them measured their cycle times in *milliseconds*. > Mel wrote his programs, at the time, for the LGP-30, a drum machine which measured instruction execution times in milliseconds. The computer had a whopping 16Kbytes of memory (4K words 32 bits each) with interlaced sectors so sequential instructions would not require a whole drum revolution. It was a single-address machine. He later "graduated" to a much bigger machine (8K words, 32 bits) with a 2 address structure [operand address + jump address] much like the IBM 650 (for those with long memories) but internally binary instead of BCD. It was, so far as I know, the last of the drum machines. We managed to shoehorn a complete Fortran II compiler onto that drum, tables and all, but just about that time SDS came out with a core-memory machine people could afford and so the machine died in the marketplace. > We not longer can afford to write programs they > way they did in the "good old days", the days of Mel. But it isn't fair to > judge Mel by today's standards. > > -Alan Jeddeloh (503) 685-2991 I agree. Remember, even the term "software" sounded new and funny -- a kind of take-off on "hardware" -- and the dialog between man and machine was not complicated by the expectation that anyone (*anyone*) would ever read the code. Code was for machines to read, not people. Comments? Well, if you needed to *remind* yourself of something later, maybe, but if it was that complicated it probably wouldn't fit into memory anyway. Another point of reference: the number of computers that could expect to be sold was seriously limited for the future because there would not be enough programmers to keep them busy. By that people meant *professional* programmers, people in white smocks who tended the IBM and Univac monoliths behind the glass doors and wrote the programs they ran, mostly in assembler. Mere mortals were not allowed to write programs. As Hamming put it in a talk I heard, the "closed shop" system, where you told a "professional" what your program should do, and he wrote it for you, "...is a system guaranteed to get an extremely efficient program written that will solve the wrong problem." comp.nostalgia anyone? -- Ed Nather Astronomy Dept, U of Texas @ Austin