Please congratulate me

[ChrisGreaves]

This month marks my fifty years in programming computers.
May 1967.
FORTRAN II on an IBM 1620 at the University of Western Australia.
(Later on I found and purchased a copy of Daniel D. McCracken's book)
Punched cards.
No printing on the output.
No printers.
This means I am noe entring my fifty-first year of maiking the moost appauling errours and mithtakes.

[HansV]

Congratulations, Chris! (Or should that be Chrith?)

[Rudi]

Congrathulations Chriis

[BobH]

You mean you managed to miss COBOL, ALGOL, BAL, and PL/1?

Oh, I forgot to mention PASCAL.

[ChrisGreaves]

Congratulations, Chris! (Or should that be Chrith?)

Thamks, I thimk ...

[ChrisGreaves]

Congrathulations Chriis

nanks Rudii (both of you)

[John Gray]

This month marks my fifty years in programming computers.
May 1967.
FORTRAN II on an IBM 1620 at the University of Western Australia.
(Later on I found and purchased a copy of Daniel D. McCracken's book)

I have just hoiked out from a bookcase my copy of
Daniel D. McCracken
A guide to FORTRAN IV programming
and find that it is © 1965...

[ChrisGreaves]

You mean you managed to miss COBOL, ALGOL, BAL, and PL/1? Oh, I forgot to mention PASCAL.

All those except BAL came later.

However YOU missed out Macro-6, Macro-X, Plasyd, PsFul, PLAN, ....

[ChrisGreaves]

I have just hoiked out from a bookcase my copy of Daniel D. McCracken A guide to FORTRAN IV programming and find that it is © 1965...

I'm Sure.
But ***I*** was in Western Australia and all the bookshop had was FORTRAN II.
(I'm pretty sure that the book was "II"; I know the 1620 had a "II" compiler")
Cheers
Chris
P.S. I also bought his Algol, COBOL later on ...

[John Gray]

You are right - his previous (and lesser) manual was on FORTRAN II.
I don't think this supported the delights of Object-Time FORMATs.
How times have changed, eh?!

[viking33]

Everyone seems to forget COOGAN, FILLINON AND ZAPITTOME? (ver. II & III )

[ChrisGreaves]

... the delights of Object-Time FORMATs....

When did they do away with Run-time
Or for that matter flee-time

[AlanMiller]

You're 2 years more advanced than me. I cut mine on an IBM 360/67 using the Watfor implementation of Fortran IV.
Then onto PL/1 and assembly language. All mixed in with a nice dose of JCL.

Ah, nostalgia.

Alan

[John Gray]

Alan, what did your 360/67 run?
Newcastle University (UK!) ran the Michigan Terminal System (MTS) which was a fairly decent time-sharing service for the time with IBM 2260 (and other) terminals. It used a 4 MB [yes!] IBM 2301 drum for paging - this had to be started about 5-15 minutes before the main machine, so that it could warm up and have the rotating drum expand ever-so-slightly towards the fixed read/write heads! We learned AlgolW and BAL, and even had a bod from IBM come in to teach a course on systems analysis.

Nostalgia isn't what it used to be...

[AlanMiller]

I'm afraid I don't know that level of detail John. I was just a kid "flying blind" with this amazing toy I had access to. Lots of monkey-see -> monkey-do. But you did remind me that, back then, CPU time cost about US$2/minute. Our family was in Washington state then, when a family-sized pumpkin pie cost 20¢ from the supermarket!

Nostalgia ... it's been around for as long as I can remember.

Alan

[LisaGreen]

Congratulations Chris Greaves!!!

[ChrisGreaves]

... a nice dose of JCL.

Alan, please do not mention that O/s again.
I was just beginning to enjoy life again, and you've gone and ruined it!

(If I recall, versions of JCL in the 60/70s allowed one to allocate physical areas of disk drives to one's files, and it was just too bad fr other user5s if you screwed up the track and/or sectpr numbers ...)

(signed) "OverDOSed" of Toronto

[PJ_in_FL]

Oh how I remember those fun days of muddling through cryptic Job Control Language statements to run my simulations. We had a little Fortran based program called CSMP, Continuous System Modeling Program, that I had fun with. So good in fact that my manager had to call me in and ask why I had used 2 HOURS of CPU time on our 370's and 303X's in the past month. Most jobs ran in under 3 seconds or so. Seems his budget didn't account for people actually simulating all the variables in a Monte Carlo systems analysis. <sigh>
Things got much nicer when I got away from the mainframe that used CMS/SPF and moved to VM/360 and REXX! Mike Cowlishaw quickly became our hero when he published that language.

[Skitterbug]

This month marks my fifty years in programming computers.
May 1967.

I congratulate you Chris. Did you celebrate by eating a tub of ice cream? You should have!

[Rudi]

This month marks my fifty years in programming computers.
May 1967.

I congratulate you Chris. Did you celebrate by eating a tub of ice cream? You should have!

Yep. Should we call up Sea Salt Caramel again?