UK Vintage Radio Repair and Restoration Discussion Forum - View Single Post - They don't come much more Vintage than this

Craig Sawyers · 17th Jan 2017, 10:42 am

My first programming was at Southampton U in 1974. They had an ICL mainframe, and I produced stacks of punched cards for programs I had written in Fortran and Algol. If you wanted more than 16k of core you had to have written permission from your supervisor (there was a maximum of 32k).

Rather later in 1979 I was writing optical design programs in BASIC to run on the Electronics department Modcomp, and later ported them into probably the first RM desktop. Two 8" floppy drives, one for the operating system and one for program and data.

In my first job in 1981 it was my task first thing to boot the PDP8. Several key entries got it to recognise the punched tape reader, which got it to recognise the washing machine size hard drive - and then the machine finally woke up.

I finally threw in the towel when object oriented programming came in in its various guises. My poor 1970's brain could not cope with that.

But I never formally programmed in assembler, although I did a bit just for fun in the early 80's.

17th Jan 2017, 10:42 am	#17
Craig Sawyers Dekatron Join Date: Nov 2010 Location: Oxford, UK. Posts: 4,991	Re: They don't come much more Vintage than this My first programming was at Southampton U in 1974. They had an ICL mainframe, and I produced stacks of punched cards for programs I had written in Fortran and Algol. If you wanted more than 16k of core you had to have written permission from your supervisor (there was a maximum of 32k). Rather later in 1979 I was writing optical design programs in BASIC to run on the Electronics department Modcomp, and later ported them into probably the first RM desktop. Two 8" floppy drives, one for the operating system and one for program and data. In my first job in 1981 it was my task first thing to boot the PDP8. Several key entries got it to recognise the punched tape reader, which got it to recognise the washing machine size hard drive - and then the machine finally woke up. I finally threw in the towel when object oriented programming came in in its various guises. My poor 1970's brain could not cope with that. But I never formally programmed in assembler, although I did a bit just for fun in the early 80's.