Any Body Else?

In article ,
Allen wrote:

Anyway later on I got involved with an IBM 1401, IBM 360 and its
successors, various minis (my favorite was the IBM Series 1) and micros.
I've forgotten how many languages I knew (and I hated COBOL).

I must have beaten you to digital computers.
My first was the Buroughs E101 in '58.

Cobol was a bit rigid, not my first choice, but very good to organize a
programs parts.

"Mac G" wrote in message
...
I must have beaten you to digital computers.
My first was the Buroughs E101 in '58.

Cobol was a bit rigid, not my first choice, but very good to organize
a
programs parts.

I used to program Burroughs computers in the early '70's when they were
popular in the banking industry. I actually liked them, especially the
B-3500. It had the easiest assembly language I ever encountered and
after a short time I could almost figure out what Cobol instruction
generates what assembly code, mostly because their assembly language was
based on binary-coded decimal (BCD) system instead of pure binary. Then
I had to learn to program and operate a much more ancient computer used
at a bank to read magnetic ink encoded checks and sort them (reader
sorters.) The machine code on that computer had to be loaded in punched
cards and you had to push some buttons on its panel to give it the
starting instruction address as well. It's amazing how much work could
actually be done with such primitive computers at the time.

Mac G wrote:
In article ,
Allen wrote:

Anyway later on I got involved with an IBM 1401, IBM 360 and its
successors, various minis (my favorite was the IBM Series 1) and micros.
I've forgotten how many languages I knew (and I hated COBOL).

I must have beaten you to digital computers.
My first was the Buroughs E101 in '58.

Cobol was a bit rigid, not my first choice, but very good to organize a
programs parts.
My problem with COBOL (D was the only version I ever used) was its sheer
wordiness. Things like "USAGE IS COMPUTATIONAL 3" that in 360-370
assembler could be expressed in two characters. I wasn't officially a
programmer or even in our data processing department but I learned a lot
about programming. The bank I worked for knew I was tri-lingual (spoke
computer, banker and English) and they sent me to a 10-week IBM class
titled "Fundamentals of Systems Science", where I learned 360/370
assembler, COBOL D, Fortran, even RPG2, and my favorite, PL/1, which was
a great language but such a resource hog that few sites could handle it.
One of its charms was that it was free-form. One of our assignments was
to write a program to calculate the present value of the $24 the Indians
were paid for Manhattan at a 6% annual compounding rate. The exercise
was to write it as concisely as possible--most of the people in my class
did it in 41 columns on one punchcard. I don't know how many keystrokes
and cards it would have required in COBOL. My mainframe programming was
limited to cases where our programming department wouldn't write
something I needed--I used COBOL in those cases to eat up as many
resources as possible and shame them into doing it right. Several times
I had to explain to them that they were the bank's programming
department, not that the bank wasn't a department of Programming.
Actually, just about every programmer was a good friend because they
also didn't like their management. To continue with the wordiness, in a
meeting to talk about a request, the programming manager said "We can't
do that" once too many times. I asked "What do you mean by you can't do
it? Is it an illogical request? Not enough resources? then a few other
things, then "Or you just don't want to do it?" He never again said "we
can't" without explaining. More than ten years later, after we had
merged and some of our people who had been transferred to branches in
other cities were calling asking me what the ten questions I had asked
were.
Allen