I'm so old I remember when the internet didn't have commercials.

@TimWardCam @AncTreat5358 @trouble @geospacedman @kibcol1049 I didn't know him but my first job was at CCAT, so I knew several people who did and my best friend at Aston University wrote a comparative report on typeless BCPL vs strictly-typed Algol 68 as his final year project. I wish I'd had time to read it

@nlarson830 @kibcol1049 @harrymuzz
I signed up for a community college sort of computer programming class, 'cuz I was certain computers would be a huge part of my career (correct).

Looked at the shopping list for the syllabus of the COBOL class, & saw I needed to buy a box of punch cards.

Immediately dropped the class. I would've been cool with learning COBOL, but if they were still doing punchcards when I already had an XT with dual floppy drives, they were too backward.

@stuartl @geospacedman @kibcol1049 When I were young we just had 2 rocks to bang together.

@woo @AncTreat5358 @trouble @geospacedman @kibcol1049 The type system in Algol 68C was, it seemed to me, so strict that when you eventually managed to get your code to compile it didn't have any bugs left in it!

@TimWardCam @AncTreat5358 @trouble @geospacedman @kibcol1049 I certainly never had time to discover any deeper bugs, by the time I got anything to compile. We only had 2 compiles per day, max.

@AncTreat5358 @trouble @geospacedman @kibcol1049 Tooting of the founding folks, I just discovered that Martin Richards recently wrote a paper about BCPL on the Raspberry Pi. He was Eben Upton's PhD supervisor.

@AncTreat5358 @trouble @geospacedman @kibcol1049 Here's Part 1
https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mr10/bcpl4raspi.pdf

@MissConstrue @trouble @AncTreat5358 @geospacedman @kibcol1049
I missed punchcards by about a year, d we got to use the snazzy new 80 column green screen monitors

I'm so old I remember when the internet didn't have commercials.

@woo @AncTreat5358 @trouble @geospacedman @kibcol1049 The type system in Algol 68C was, it seemed to me, so strict that when you eventually managed to get your code to compile it didn't have any bugs left in it!

@kelvin0mql @kibcol1049 @harrymuzz

I wouldn't be surprised if banks still used punchcards for their COBOL

@TimWardCam @woo @AncTreat5358 @trouble @geospacedman @kibcol1049
You still could have an endless Loop.

@harrymuzz At my first job, the computer room temperature was controlled with double door air lock to enter. The computer was huge with punch card operators typing and huge floor to ceiling reel to reel tapes. The print outs were on large sheets of paper and took several runs for all the errors to be corrected. With programmers, inputters and clerks, there were about 8 staff. Nowadays a kid of 8 or 9 could do it all and more on a smartphone and 30 times quicker! Hard to believe but true.

@kibcol1049 I remeber the double doors, and the tape decks, first hardware I operated had 1 inch tape, and we had to skew the head with a large screwdriver , watching an oscilloscope to get lined up......The air con noise, that endless stationary ...........64k, K!! filled a small room.

@kibcol1049 I remeber the double doors, and the tape decks, first hardware I operated had 1 inch tape, and we had to skew the head with a large screwdriver , watching an oscilloscope to get lined up......The air con noise, that endless stationary ...........64k, K!! filled a small room.

@harrymuzz @kibcol1049 my first job in the industry was realigning the heads on 8" drives with a screwdriver you'd consider too big for working on your car these days

They were pretty much obsolete by this time but it just shows how quickly things change. These days there will be people starting their first jobs surprised that physical media is still used in their new workplace.

I'm so old I remember when the internet didn't have commercials.

@kibcol1049
Can I be the 94th person to say I remember the Internet without the World Wide Web

I'm so old I remember when the internet didn't have commercials.

@kibcol1049 Me too! I go back to the days of Usenet.

Sometimes I wonder if we could somehow use Usenet to organize against the oligarchy. It was designed to resist atomic attack, after all...