What modern machines! The first one I got to grips with was an Eliot 903 which I was helped to program(me) using Eliot Algol to process my experimental results. No hard drives, no floppies, no attached keyboard and yes - no CRT monitor either! Type your program(me) on a teleprinter which produces a strip of paper tape. Feed this into the tape reader of the computer. In a flash with a screaming noise the tape punch ejects miles and miles of tape containing the machine code. Now flip a couple of switches, feed this into the tape reader, then move another switch and feed in another length of tape with which you have recorded the results of your experiment. In a flash another lenght of tape is punched which, when read and printed out by the teleprinter gives you the required results. It machines like this that the Colossal Cave and other similar text adventure games were written for. Of course the difficult bit was writimg the program(me) which had to be letter, space and punctuation perfect!
XYZZY!
P.P.
Last edited by P.Pilcher; 5th March 2008 at 21:20.