Programming in 1969: An interview with a pioneer – my mum
ilikebigbits.com
ilikebigbits.com
Eventually the pressure from Feynman to keep up the pace of calculation was so great that the kids, keeping track of program progress in their heads, would yell at him anytime he came into the computer room to ask a question because it meant losing track and having to restart the programs which were many, many cards. This meant losing days of precious time if they had to start over or if a program broke.
Finally the kids got so stressed debugging (and failing to debug) these long running programs that they devised a way to run multiple programs at alongside each other by color coding the punch cards, and then recording break points in the programs when they failed. This allowed them to keep the machines always running with one kid in charge the different variants of the programs they were running.
http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/34/3/FeynmanLosAlamos.h... , search for IBM.
Probably so.
Thanks for filling in the details.
EDIT: and Texas.
Once when I was young (in the 80s) I found a roll of paper with punched holes in them in our family's home. It turned out that my dad had taken a course in "automatic data management" while studying economics at Lund University, Sweden some time around 1963 or so. A course assignment had been to create a few programs in ALGOL. (I got that part because he had kept the course book.)
I spent so much time trying to decode this roll of punched tape. My dad wasn't of much help. He didn't really understand why I was so excited about this. Eventually I managed to decode the roll of paper, probably after getting some kind of character set guide; I don't really remember. I wish I still had this tape of punched paper... I do remember it was really exciting to write out the ALGOL program in clear text as I painstaikingly decoded the punched tape.
I was that kid who was really into computing, but so starved of input, in the middle of nowhere.
I think his exercises were run on:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BESK
"BESK (Binär Elektronisk SekvensKalkylator, Swedish for "Binary Electronic Sequence Calculator") was Sweden's first electronic computer, using vacuum tubes instead of relays. It was developed by Matematikmaskinnämnden (Swedish Board for Computing Machinery) and for a short time it was the fastest computer in the world. The computer was completed in 1953 and in use until 1966."
or
I remember being surprised at the time just how quickly I learned to read papertape, just having the tape in my left hand with my thumb at the current position and writing the character with my right hand, shimmy the tape, next character
(They also, while not being super well paid as municipal workers also sprung for two more computers for me - one 8086 PC in ~89 and one 80486 PC in ~93. So thankful. These things were so expensive back then, probably at least 1.5x a monthly salary after taxes.)
Years later I learned that those printouts came from air defense systems, and counterintelligence was involved in our little tragedy.
As for "just doing your job" - that's actually rather complex. If you were delivering mail or sweeping the streets then, obviously, you have nothing to answer for. But what if you were, say ,a high-level municipal official in a town where the Jewish population was rounded up under your watch? What if you were a police officer? A judge? A manager in Deutche Reichsbahn (the state railway service)? A department manager in a government ministry? A faculty member in a university from which subversives and undesirable-race people were cleansed? It's not as simple as just doing your job.
I'm not preaching to _ph_ here, just emphasizing that for a lot of people, they were industriously pushing forward the Nazi state, and then at some point the flags changed, the ideology changed, the rhetoric changed and now we were all "no longer Nazis".
I am so picky on that point, because saying "Nazi Germany just continued to exist" is very likely to give people, who are not familiar with Germany the wrong impression[1]. Nazi Germany did not continue to exist. There is a lot of valid criticism how society dealt with the Nazi regime, but it was (as a regime) in the past.
[1] Some months ago, an American friend of mine was surprised to learn that the whole continental Europe does drive to the right.
My point is, that - unfortunately - there isn't such a unbridgeable chasm between a Capitalist democracy and a Fascist autocracy as people would like to imagine. Ruling elites can turn the dial this way or that way without that much change, even on the level of top personnel and organizational structures.
If faced with significant social upheaval, or other structural threats, many democracies would very likely turn more authoritarian, more nationalist, more racist, more corporatist - would become Fascistic. In fact, they do.
Exactly. Alas, that’s what we’re seeing in Eastern Europe right now. Hungary being the best example, Poland also though luckily slightly less so. I wouldn’t call it Fascism specifically, more like conservative authoritarianism, but still.
Could this be the very first "dating app"?! Amazing.
Not likely ... this was a common idea among young programmers, and there were several such programs floating around the UCLA Computer Club when I was there in the 60's.
My somewhat similar one: In the early ‘50s my mother took the one and only computer class her university offered. At one point a guy from the local defense contractor comes in (!) and essentially offers everyone in the class with a half-decent grade a job at the end of the year. She took them up on it and that’s how she got into computers. She also claims she used to manually bootstrap a computer using toggle switches to initiate a loader and then feed it punch cards (when not in use, kept in a card-catalog cabinet like libraries used to have). I guess I shouldn’t doubt it too much. She did used to bring old (some used!) punch cards home from work for us kids to play with. I suppose they must have been clearing out obsolete equipment and systems.
How ELSE would you do it, on a machine with no ROM? We always had to manually enter one instruction into memory to start up the card reader to read the bootstrap card. (This was long before the PDP-11's that others have mentioned.)
"She did used to bring old (some used!) punch cards home from work for us kids to play with. I suppose they must have been clearing out obsolete equipment and systems."
Old used punch cards were far more prevalent than new ones ... every time you type a line into your computer and then delete or correct it, that's equivalent to having an old punch card.
Not implausible, check http://www.pdp-11.nl/peripherals/how-to-bootstrap.html for booting a PDP11. I suspect it was before even this as I have never heard of a PDP11 with punched cards. Wasn't IBM the big punched card people?
edit: @madengr 0 minutes ago: snap
After this the bootstrapping happens. The first card or two are machine instruction loaded by the ROM at a certain location that the ROM jumps to. These machine instruction read the next few cards into the addresses just after the current PC so they are executed next and these instructions read more cards. Eventually, the rest of the loop forming the real loader is read in. By writing the loader in machine language and putting it at the front of the program be loaded one minimizes the number of values that need to be manually inserted into memory with panel switches.
Edit: In retrospect, I’m pretty sure the first system where I did this didn’t even have ROM support. It might have required actually keying in the values to a paper tape reader device control registers. (PDP-8 timeframe) However the idea was the same, a few values keyed into a memory location, set the PC, and then push run; the rest of the loader code was on the paper tape or punch cards ahead of the actual program.
The system I’m thinking of was a kind of experimental system at MIT with odd peripherals. It had the first CRT I ever used. It had maybe 16 lines of perhaps 40 characters each. The phosphors used glowed orange and had a long persistence because of the low refresh rate. The room lights had to be very dim otherwise the characters would dim to invisibility.
I used teletypes and other hard copy kinds of terminals and punch cards other than this weird homemade CRT system until I got to grad school in 1974.
Sometimes these broke down and you could manually toggle the initial boot sequence in.
Even more common in earlier systems I would imagine
Also, programming today is different in many ways from programming in the 1960s.
Like load phase 1. Load data cards and start Phase 1. Punch cards are produced with modified data for phase 2. Load phase 2. Load Phase 2 data and start Phase 2. Run Phase 2.
There were often even more phases.
I've been programming since 1975.
My mother was a programmer in the mid to late 60s, as was my father. As am I [edit: currently! I'm obviously not a programmer in the 60s]
I'm curious as to the size of the population that can make the same claim (programmer with both parents being programmers)
Analyst/programmer/developer/engineer
I, on the other hand, am a very poor programmer.
https://media.phillyvoice.com/media/images/02102016_ENIAC_pr...
Of course there wasn't enough RAM ... we used phases, overlays, and other techniques to juggle the code.
Later I helped build the ARPANET at UCLA ... that was 1969-70. We were still pioneers.
My fond memories included:
- Discovering the paper tape machine.
- Writing stories on the card punch machine, one line per card.
- Pressing buttons on the massive card sorting machine when noone was looking.
- Walking to the Computer Centre to pick up the output of my mum's previous day's coding. If she was lucky, there was a thick stack of fanfold paper in her pigeonhole. If not, just a couple of pages with the error message.
- Around 1978, playing with her HP RPN calculator. It had an inbuilt reader for programs on small magnetic strips. I typed in the example Moon Lander program from the manual and spent a few hours figuring out how much thrust was needed to land without crashing.
- Some time around 1979 they got a computer with a video display and a lightpen. And a 300 baud acoustic coupler.
OMG! when have we stopped doing that?
Writing this way is time consuming but ensures nobody including you wants to maintain it or add features.
When my dad went to high school in the town of Skövde, Sweden he visited Volvo and they also served cake on punch cards there :)
> I needed the salary to get my own apartment.
Just think that with the starting salary of a non-academically-trained employee (in a desirable position, but still) - you could reasonably buy your own apartment.