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Comment by cdeutsch | Hacker News Reader

Ada was the first language I learned at the University of North Dakota's Computer Science program in 1996.

Since the university is known for its Areospace program, I guess that made sense to pick Ada as their primary language.

Interesting, in Fall of 1988, University of North Dakota was using Modula-2 as the starting language for their core classes having switched from Pascal in the Summer. The classes were taught on an IBM 370, so students also got to learn the joys of Xedit, IBM terminals, EBCDIC, and batch processing. They only used Ada for the Software Engineering class which I took and was very disappointed in, but not the language which I liked. Lisp was not fun on the VAX.

One of the things I'm a bit ticked about is that they moved the CompSci program from Aerospace to the School of Mines and Engineering. So, just as the drone era is starting they move CompSci to better align with other colleges. What a crock.

Oh cool, a UND Computer Science Alumni hangout. I started with Pascal on the IBM mainframe VSPC in the fall of '83. Batch processing was a shock coming from an Apple ][ background in high school. Was nicer when we got access to the interactive machines like the VAX and the PDP/11. I liked Ada, vaguely remember it being on the VAX.

Still have my photocopied manual for BSD 2.9 on the PDP/11 - never imagined at the time that that Unix stuff would take over the world. Nice to have had that early exposure.

They still had VSPC in 85, but had switched to CMS by 87. The punch card reader / printer ended in 85, and somewhere in a box I got a stack of cards. I took C on the VAX (they bought a AT&T 3B2 somewhere around 90 or 91), and I do vaguely remember Ada was on the VAX also.

My early hate of Lisp was a direct result of them teaching it on the VAX. I was told the VAX had 4MBytes of actual memory and the each Lisp instance took 5. I played poker in the basement of Upson II while the damn thing loaded my program and played more while it ran. Being a lover of Forth at that point, tended to make me think Lisp was a bit of a hog.

Somehow the school got a Cray (I think from a oil company), but they weren't given the manuals right away. The manuals that they printed came from microfiche I had. I'm not sure if any students ever got to use it.

UND did give a unique experience in a CompSci degree.

Never got to touch the Cray, but did some Fortran work on a Perkin-Elmer minicomputer the Aviation department had.

Looking back, in the space of 3 years I got to work on quite a few completely different OSes (VSPC, VM/CMS, MS-DOS, VMS, Unix, whatever the Perkin-Elmer was) and languages (Pascal, 370 assembler, PL/I, Fortran, Lisp, Ada, C)

I wonder if kids nowadays get that kind of broad experience.

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