[gambit-list] Old programmers

John Velman velman at cox.net
Wed Mar 13 11:12:47 EDT 2013


Well, looks like some are older than me, but I once worked on a BIG project, I
was the system designer, more or less, and I had someone called a program
analyst and a programmer working with me.  The program was written in FAP.
One day after a trial run, after we found an error, the keypunch machines
were unavailable.  Our programmer made a patch to fix the error by cutting
a very precise hole in a punch card with an exacto knife.

Fun days.  We used to keep our bowling scores in octal to keep in practice
for reading core dumps. (Yes memory was in a large array of tiny rings
called magnetic cores).

As I recall, I took the first computer class at my college, and we wrote
our first program to take square root using Newton's method on a drum
storage machine -- I don't recall it's name.

John V.

On Tue, Mar 12, 2013 at 12:25:02PM -0400, Raffael Cavallaro wrote:
> 
> On Mar 12, 2013, at 11:21 AM, Bradley Lucier <lucier at math.purdue.edu> wrote:
> 
> > In the name of all punchcard-programming grandpas, all I can say is "Ouch, that one hurt."
> 
> Yikes! What does it say that before I graduated to punch cards I learned to program by toggling switches to enter individual bytes? :)
> 
> warmest regards,
> 
> Ralph
> 
> 
> 
> Sent from my iPad
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