Handwritten coding sheets for Burroughs 205 Algol (1960) [pdf]
archive.computerhistory.org
archive.computerhistory.org
There was a "front panel" on every computer that showed the registers and memory. You could "single step" through your program to see what was in the registers. When DEC shipped the PDP-11 series the front panel was gone. I didn't know how I was going to debug. (Imagine single-stepping a program that runs on a 3 GHz machine.)
Next task was to transfer the program to paper tape using a piece of plastic with a slot for the tape, 8 holes, and a slim rod to punch out the bits. Be sure to leave a couple extra bytes so you can "hot patch" the program. This involved changing the bits into a jump to an address where you had punched new instructions.
Oddly though, I don't see the literate programming markup. I guess that's on the next page.
That's not true. The earlier models definitely had front panels. Only the very latest had reduced or no front panels.
"It was becoming clear to me that Dr. Forsythe and Dr. Harroit wanted a B5000. But the best that Burroughs would offer was about a 40% discount. IBM was offering them the world to take an IBM 7090. Finally, IBM said that they would give Stanford the 7090 for free plus a gift of $900000 that could be used to build a new computer center. Stanford had a Burroughs 220 and IBM was determined to dislodge us. Stanford accepted the offer and used $400000 to build the computer center and $500000 to buy a B5000. So IBM had unwittingly paid Stanford to buy a B5000, much to their dismay. "
First, a nice illustration of shady practices that get shoddy tech to dominant market share. Windows had its share, too. Second, a rare illustration of it backfiring in an epic way. That the inferior, pretend-to-be-first, mainframe company bought them The Real Deal by mistake is just hard to top. It's better than when Microsoft was called out on NT Server's alleged superiority over AS/400's by pointing out they ran their whole business on an AS/400. These moments just don't happen enough.
The Fortran vs Algol vs people who open mail moment was great, too.
"We had written our [compiler] in STAR 0, the only assembler that Burroughs supported on the 205. Our compiler took one hour and 45 minutes to assemble. The first week of don's project he spent in writing his own assembler. He could assemble his compiler in 45 minutes. We were green with envy."
That's practical, right? He had limited computer time, and since every change meant a re-assembly, the obvious answer to quicker turnaround was to write a faster assembler...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Level_Assembly
Maybe it with s-expressions and Wirth-style compilation. Might have made those iterations pretty fast with lots of efficiency. The HLL's too heavy to compile could be mapped to it by hand if they wanted.
Kimpel has written an emulator for the Burroughs 205, and has been able to execute two versions of Knuth's Algol 58 compiler on the emulator.
I don't know how to explain it, typically, but notebooks are incredibly intimidating when the examples you see will be perfect end products. Seeing a few of the sheets that made it into the trash are really instructive.
I follow with great interest everything Burroughs related, specially their approaches to safe programming.