March 28, 2016 at 9:01 am
roger.plowman (3/24/2016)
Preaching to the choir here. 😀My first programming was done on a 1962 vintage IBM 1130. In Fortran. On punch cards. (laughing)
Ditto. Fortran on punch cards. Then COBOL, and assembler.
Assembler with Hollerith cards, now that is minimalist programming!
Back in the day, hands on computing was when you pulled out sub-routine cards in the deck, placed it on the table, and reordered the cards.
As for RBAR, SQL Server is designed as a set based relational engine. No RBAR required.
As I recall, cursors were included in ANSI for Oracle. It struggled with set based commands.
The more you are prepared, the less you need it.
March 28, 2016 at 3:26 pm
Andrew..Peterson (3/28/2016)
roger.plowman (3/24/2016)
Preaching to the choir here. 😀My first programming was done on a 1962 vintage IBM 1130. In Fortran. On punch cards. (laughing)
Ditto. Fortran on punch cards. Then COBOL, and assembler.
Assembler with Hollerith cards, now that is minimalist programming!
No No No, not minimalist. In Fortran with cards you had columns 73 to 80 to put a sequence number in, so that when you dropped the deck you could use a sorter to get them in order. And with 8 colums for sequence number and the core size if the mchine you could start numbering by units of 10000 so that inserting extra bits without renumbering existing cards was easy.
My first computing experience (apart from spaghetti board) was working mainly in Fortran on Orion. I did some bits in the macrolanguage too (can't remember what that was called). All that was on paper tape - the thing had no card input. It did have some (usually misfunctioning) mag tape drives. If I remember right it had an 8k word memory and 16k drum.
Real inimalist was paper tape. Every program change required the whole tape to be copied up to the point before the change, then the changes typed, anything not wanted skipped without punching (that tended to be hard on most tape punching gdgets) and then copy the rest. That was really a pain. And if you dropped the reel it usually ended up with the tape creased and liable to tear when you put it through the reader.
Years later in a very different place we used to throw paper tape out of a top floor window and wind it back in if it had got dropped and looked liable to crease; that worked fine.
Tom
March 29, 2016 at 2:38 am
Fortunately I managed to avoid the real minimalist of setting dip switches to enter the program and my experience of paper tape was limited to loading the OS for a PDP 8 which we used as a TCP.
The other trick with card decks was to draw a diagonal line across the deck so it was obvious if any cards were out of order.
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