Hacker News Reader

The Wikipedia page doesn’t really give any impression of what it’s like to program in RPG with SEU, and with SDA. I wouldn’t say they’re very close to using vi or Emacs at all.

I have very bad memories of STOS BASIC, mostly around how very slow it was.

View on HN

The RPG we used was column based, Flag number in this column, command in that column and so on. We used paper to do the program and then keyed in on a terminal emulator running on a ps/2 that was connected to the central computer over a modem. When running programs they got put in a batch queue and we had to wait until it was our turn and then the printer started spitting out the resulting data. You made sure to think before running things :-)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com