I have a degree in Computing Science

[Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh!]

...but I got it in 1981


I was just reading up on CAPTCHAs and it made me realise how much this field has grown in the past ... erm ... fark me, 27 years

There was no internet, no email, I don't even think there were PCs. We studied COBOL and Pascal, Grammar and I think we studied architecture a little.

But the funniest thinng is that my career (and I use that term loosely) ended up being on mainframe computers, so I'm essentially using the same technology now, TSO, JCL, COBOL etc that I was back then

[batninth]

Mr A,

I got my degree in Computer Science in 1982 so I'm obviously much, much more up-to-date than you. Where I do disagree is over e-mail, we were using it back then largely to organise visits to the pub.

What gets me is how we see the same things coming around time & again in our business, but every time they're heralded as the great new hope.

Today people go on about the different flavours of Linux, some talk of a single unified Linux distribution. It was Unix System 7 & BSD back then, then we got into System 5 and the big "Open Systems" debate - OSF/1 etc, and all the talk of unification. It didn't happen then & it most likely won't now.

We also had the big "micro-kernel" debate (OSF/1 again!) and how we'd load a minimal kernel & add plug-ins to it to customise it to be what we need. This time it's the same debate with Microsoft through the Windows Server 2008 & Windows 7 debates.

The server was going to be the centre of the world and we'd have no intelligence at the user interface - then they called in "X", now we call it Thin-Client. Xerox PARC had the user benefits of it nailed all along in 82, but it needed Apple to bring it to market.

Of course IBM et al had other ideas - they distributed the intelligence into smart comms & IO controllers. Which is why now I laugh when they buy smart HBAs or intelligent NICs to go in the servers - nothing new there.

I guess the internet is different - I recall the early stirings of JANET back in 81-82, and how novel it was to run programs on machines in another part fo the UK and exchange files. One hot book back then for Computer folks was Ted Nelson describing something called HyperText with links in it called Universal Resource Locators. Hmm...wonder what happened to that?

The other hot book back then was Douglas Hoefstatdler (?) - "Godel, Escher, Bach.." - my son thought it was hot 3 years ago when he did CS as part of his degree.

Back then we had 8-bit processors on the desk and 32-bits in mainframes (or 48-bits). For the 16-bit or 32-bit systems we used microsode to make the CPUs give us a richer instruction set. Some people decided to take instructions out of the processor architecture & hailed a new technology called Reduced Instruction Set Computing (RISC). Then they told us that the way forward was through using microcode...and we had the 386 debacle. Every new turn of the processor screw sees us either losing instructions or putting them back. In 1982 I worked with a guy on processor-memory switching - guess what is in the modern multi-core processors?

In some ways, times do change but how often is it that when you look behind the veneer you see the same old ideas coming up again.

Yours, suddenly feeling old

batninth


PS. We used to play a game back then with the magic word "XYZZY", I even saw that in these very forums only the other day. Can't see it now, I guess the pirate lept out & took it with the treasure

[frostbite]

Aaah, JANET, acoustic modems, local bulletin boards.... where's my Zimmer?

[green granite]

I don't have a computing degree. The first computer I got involved with, on a programming course, was an English Electric Leo Marconi system 4 then the company's Elliot 803, both took up entire rooms.

[Background Noise]

The guys in my year (same year) all wandered around with piles of punched cards - FORTRAN - which, I have just found out, is still around.

[ZFT]

green granite,

My 1st programming course was Assembler on a Honeywell DDP124. This predates Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh's course by 2 decades!!!!

I'm feeling my age now so off for a 0245 hrs G & T

[Keef]

You blokes make me feel old. Come to think of it, I am old.

I remember a valve computer when I first started work. Racks of 12AT7s as I recall. If you were feeling cold in winter, that was the place to go!
It was "retired" the year after.

[419]

Rodney Trotter dic. (Diploma in computerisation)

"Del, thanks to your high profile, we now have a company called TIT, and a director with DIC after his name"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKzErZwvqmM

[green granite]

ZFT these youngsters don't know what they missed, with all these modern high level languages.

Worked for one company that built a mini computer from discreet components (no micros about in those days) they just used M/C code for ages until some clever sod wrote an assembler compiler for it.

[ZFT]

green granite,

I had the pleasure of teaching Assembler for about 6 months many moons ago. Time and memory were the principle considerations.

The so called High level languages are so much easier and due to technology no one cares about programming efficiency.

[Mr C Hinecap]

Hands up who else had a ZX 81 then.
I do remember being wowed by the new 486s we had - made the 286s look ancient.

I bet a few of you lot also did stuff behind Windows in DOS 'because it was easier for you' rather than trying to sort it in Windows.

*shuffles off a bit confused by today*

[P.Pilcher]

To this day I still haven't found out how to implement the Windows equivalent of del *.bak or similar when I need it!
I first discovered computers when during a very hot summer vacation. As a student I was working as a vacation trainee in a research station. They had just acquired an Elliot 903 and installed it in an air conditioned room. Thus I used every excuse I could find to spend time in said room! I learned a lot about paper tape readers & punches, machine code, and Elliot algol as well.

P.P.

[green granite]

In those days the aircon units were bigger than modern computers.

[batninth]

GG,

Worked for one company that built a mini computer from discreet components (no micros about in those days) they just used M/C code for ages until some clever sod wrote an assembler compiler for it.

Don't forget we also used bit-slice processors then so ended up writing the microcode to execute the machine code instructions we needed.

[green granite]

That's true, If if recall it correctly on ours they were on a daughter board which bridged across the top of 2 of the main boards in the rack, the main boards being about A3 size full of things like half adders, implemented in DTL logic. Then out came TTL 7400 series and someone redesigned it all onto A4 size boards (or whatever the sizes were in those days, my rememberer ain't what it was. )

[seacue]

I figured the way to learn about computers was to build one. I used the instruction set of a PDP-8 since its paper-tape software was freely available. To this day I have not seen the electrical nor detailed logical diagram of a PDP-8. My machine, which occupied much of a six-foot rack, started running in 1970. It was terribly slow, ten microsecond cycle time, and used a core memory surplus from an old IBM machine - all 4K 12-bit words. I used a teletype ASR-33 for IO. FOCAL was an interactive language (for the PDP-8) which ran on my machine. I also wrote a few useful programs in assembler.

I had already taken an introductory Fortran course.

From there I progressed to a Northstar Z-80 based machine, which still sits in a corner. I shuddered when I recently found its bill-of-sale US$2400.

Computers are now so complex, where do people start these days if they are hardware oriented?

Later I built a local area network including the hardware ... from the chip level ... using a 6502 microprocessor in each node. It went into service in 1979 and grew to over 1200 nodes before being replaced by an Ethernet.

I not only feel old, I am old.

[Mac the Knife]

"Hands up who else had a ZX 81 then."

Me. Learned assembler on it. Still have the parsimonious programming habits too. Self-modifying code was fun (but a b*stard to debug).

"To this day I still haven't found out how to implement the Windows equivalent of del *.bak or similar when I need it!"

"Open command window here" in Windows Explorer and del *.asm away to your hearts content

[The Nr Fairy]

Mac:

I'm comfy with that but there's also GUI (ok, ok, I'll get my coat in a moment) way to do it - for the benefit of P Pilcher.

Either show file extensions, and sort by file type, then CTRL-click, or SHIFT-click top and bottom of the relevant section of the list, then "DEL".

Or search for *.bak then SHIFT-click the top and bottom entries, then delete.

[Edit] Of course, do all the above in a Windows Explorer window !

[P.Pilcher]

Thanks for that Mac and Nr Fairy - It sounds terribly complicated - del *.bak is so much easier!!

P.P.

[matt_hooks]

The Nr Fairy, you missed a trick there.

Search for *.<insert file extension here>

left click on one

hit ctrl-a on the keyboard

hit delete.

Job done!