On Sat, 29 Aug 2020 19:49:09 +0000, Martin Gregorie wrote:

> I started programming in 1978 and have a slightly different take on it.
>
Unspotted mistake - for 1978 read 1968 - that was when I joined ICL and
learned PLAN assembler.

I had actually done a 2 week programming at university in 1967 because my
MSc thesis involved using a Mossbauer spectrometer, which output data on
paper tape. Its was fed to an Elliott 503 for analysing and plotting on a
printer. The Elliott was in interesting beast - huge because built
entirely with discrete transistors [before integrated circuits had been
invented] with 8KB 39 bit words on ferrite core memory and another 16Kb
of 39 bit ferrite core that was used as a fast disk, both for storing
programs and as scratch space for programs that handled more data than
would fit in main storage.

The Elliott 503 was programmed almost entirely in Algol 60, so that was
the first programming language I learned - and, with hindsite, a rather
good first language, especially as Elliott Algol used the reserved words
'read' and 'write' for i/o rather then the more common trick of calling
library procedures.


--
Martin    | martin at
Gregorie  | gregorie dot org

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