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Vintage Computers Any vintage computer systems, calculators, video games etc., but with an emphasis on 1980s and earlier equipment. |
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21st May 2021, 9:01 pm | #61 | |
Octode
Join Date: Apr 2018
Location: Newbury, Berkshire, UK.
Posts: 1,287
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Re: Old Programming Language
Quote:
http://archive.computerhistory.org/r....102646082.pdf |
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21st May 2021, 9:17 pm | #62 |
Heptode
Join Date: Feb 2021
Location: Edinburgh, Scotland, UK.
Posts: 528
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Re: Old Programming Language
There are many people whose view of the language is based on the old versions from over 40 years ago. Fortran is still alive, for example there is a good chance that a weather forecast generated in Europe came from a Fortran program.
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22nd May 2021, 12:07 am | #63 | |
Pentode
Join Date: Mar 2021
Location: Liphook, Hampshire, UK
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Re: Old Programming Language
Quote:
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22nd May 2021, 8:00 am | #64 | |
Dekatron
Join Date: Nov 2010
Location: Oxford, UK.
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Re: Old Programming Language
Quote:
For my research degree I used the electronic departments Modcomp IV (I cannot even remember what the programming language was), and a bit later (probably about 1978/9?) the first Research Machines product - a very chunky PC programmable in BASIC. That had two 8" floppy drives, one for the operating system (which they rightly warned to take copies of) and one for program storage. But occasionally it had a freak-out and overwrote the program floppy. Which is why you needed copies of the program floppies for recovery. It was slow, and cost the research group a fortune, but was a revolution as compared with very carefully carrying a box of punch cards across the campus to the ICL mainframe. Craig |
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22nd May 2021, 8:32 am | #65 |
Dekatron
Join Date: May 2008
Location: Derby, UK.
Posts: 7,735
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Re: Old Programming Language
I doubt Fortran will ever go away. As long as there is a need to take in one list of numbers, do something funky but repetitive with them and spit out another list of numbers, or a "fill-in-the-blanks" report, there will be a job for it. Its raw number-crunching power makes it perfect for things like weather forecasting, where you're trying to find a trend in past datasets and apply it to the last one to create a prediction; and signal processing, where you have a stream of data coming in and must transform it to produce an output stream, in real time. (The other way of dealing with a comparable situation would be to use dedicated hardware, which is the direction graphics processors took.) SPICE was originally written in FORTRAN, although it has since been transliterated into C.
FORTRAN 74 could have been someone's attempt at a proprietary extension to an already-established language, with the intention being for you to become dependent on features added by that particular vendor and therefore make it harder to choose anyone else's equipment next time.
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If I have seen further than others, it is because I was standing on a pile of failed experiments. |
22nd May 2021, 10:11 am | #66 |
Pentode
Join Date: Mar 2021
Location: Liphook, Hampshire, UK
Posts: 125
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Re: Old Programming Language
At Convex computers a large numbers of the systems were sold to do seismic processing, most of the apps in this space were FORTRAN too.
Convex had a Fortran Vector complier this it did need some help with code optimization but the fun started when getting FORTRAN programs to work in Parallel. Convex did try and automate the optimization process with the introduction of :- INTERPROCEDURAL C, FORTRAN COMPILER But the Human still had a major Edge. |
22nd May 2021, 8:06 pm | #67 |
Dekatron
Join Date: Jan 2012
Location: Brentwood, Essex, UK.
Posts: 5,316
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Re: Old Programming Language
Thanks for the Stantec link. I see there was only one CRT display for indicating register status: it was a long tine ago! Interesting to see that it used symmetrical germanium transistors.
Here's scans of the Leo III leaflets. Last edited by emeritus; 22nd May 2021 at 8:10 pm. Reason: typos |
23rd May 2021, 10:58 am | #68 |
Pentode
Join Date: Mar 2021
Location: Liphook, Hampshire, UK
Posts: 125
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Re: Old Programming Language
Hear is one :-
"On average, how many times do you need to roll a die before all six different numbers have turned up?" How about some FORTRAN to simulate the problem ! |
23rd May 2021, 11:51 am | #69 | |
Octode
Join Date: Apr 2018
Location: Newbury, Berkshire, UK.
Posts: 1,287
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Re: Old Programming Language
Quote:
Code:
program randomdice implicit none integer loopcount, kount, i, ir, counttotal logical flag(6), found counttotal=0 do loopcount=1,1000 do i=1,6 flag(i)=.false. end do found=.true. kount=0 do while (found) ir = int(rand(0)*6+1) kount = kount + 1 flag(ir)=.true. found=.false. do i=1,6 if (flag(i).eqv. .false.) then found=.true. end if end do end do counttotal = counttotal + kount end do print *, counttotal/1000.0 end program randomdice Code:
$gfortran -std=gnu *.f95 -o main $main 14.5489998 |
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23rd May 2021, 12:11 pm | #70 |
Heptode
Join Date: Sep 2018
Location: Twickenham, London, UK.
Posts: 536
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Re: Old Programming Language
When I was an undergraduate at Brunel Uni in the 1960's they had an Elliot 803, I believe most of the sales of these computers were to universities. Programming was mainly done with Elliot Autocode or Algol. If I remember correctly Autocode only allowed one operation per line so to add two variables together and multiply by a third required two lines of code, this made programs for fairly simple tasks become very long and difficult to follow. Algol was an early structured language and much better than Autode for real programming (as opposed to teaching).
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23rd May 2021, 1:59 pm | #72 |
Heptode
Join Date: Feb 2021
Location: Edinburgh, Scotland, UK.
Posts: 528
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Re: Old Programming Language
For the purists I would avoid the nonstandard rand() and in this case I don't mind using count as a variable...
Code:
program randomdice implicit none integer, parameter :: nloops=1000 integer i, count, throw, counttotal logical flag(6), all_found real r counttotal = 0 do i=1,nloops flag = .false. count = 0 all_found = .false. do while (.not.all_found) call random_number(r) throw = int(r*6+1) count = count + 1 flag(throw) = .true. all_found = all(flag) end do counttotal = counttotal + count end do print *,'experimental ', counttotal/real(nloops),', theory 14.7' end program randomdice Last edited by wireman; 23rd May 2021 at 2:13 pm. |
23rd May 2021, 2:42 pm | #73 |
Octode
Join Date: Apr 2018
Location: Newbury, Berkshire, UK.
Posts: 1,287
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Re: Old Programming Language
I was used to Fortran 77, I think RANDOM_NUMBER was introduced in Fortran 90. I had used the RAND function with F77 but it may have been from some library (I mostly used Fortran on DEC VAX computers...).
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23rd May 2021, 6:46 pm | #74 | |
Dekatron
Join Date: Apr 2012
Location: Wiltshire, UK.
Posts: 13,951
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Re: Old Programming Language
Quote:
[My involvement was largely around getting the C-1 to speak .uk.ac "Coloured Books" protocols and the then-protocols-of-the-day X.25/OSI 7-layer stuff - thankfully all that nonsense disappeared by about 1992 and we could run nice friendly TCP/IP - even though for a time IP-packets had to be encapsulated and tunneled over X.25 virtual-circuits] |
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23rd May 2021, 8:12 pm | #75 |
Nonode
Join Date: Jan 2016
Location: Stafford, Staffs. UK.
Posts: 2,529
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Re: Old Programming Language
My first programming was in BASIC (on a PET). At college we did a touch of FORTRAN though I can't be sure which one. ISTR it being F77 which would make sense it being early eighties. But Basic persisted even on the 'mainframe with terminals'. At Uni, (well Poly) we used Pascal, but again still BASIC. This was on some oddball Harris 14 bit mainframe with terminals. Towards the end of my time, we actually got PCs, including some of the early Amstrad versions. ISTR using Pascal for a project, but I was also using an 80xx (I don't remember which right now) emulator developed for a previous project that actually I ended up debugging rather than doing my project. Didn't do any programming once I was at work, for several years, but then needed to understand C. Did a course, back at Uni. Now that was the only useful one of all of them, and still have to refer back to my Kernighan and Richie when I've not been 'active' for a while. It's still extremely widely used in some industries, as well as in development environments like Arduino. In fact Arduino itself (amongst other similar environments) is still widely used in that industry, not in the product but as an easy and reliable way of pogramming tests.
At the other extreme, there are a lot of 'non language' ways of programming these days. For example Matlab / Simulink / Stateflow are essentially block diagram ways of expressing a system. But they are able to build code for a variety of microcontrollers / microprocessors. Not neccesarily code efficient, but completely removes the 'programming language' requirement. |
23rd May 2021, 10:23 pm | #77 | |
Pentode
Join Date: Mar 2021
Location: Liphook, Hampshire, UK
Posts: 125
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Re: Old Programming Language
Quote:
Code:
INT nloops = 1000; INT i, count, roll,loopcount,counttotal; BOOL not_all_found; [1:6] BOOL flag; first random(3); counttotal := 0; FOR loopcount FROM 1 TO nloops DO FOR i FROM 1 TO 6 DO flag[i] := FALSE OD; count :=0; not_all_found := TRUE; WHILE not_all_found DO roll := ENTIER (next random * 6.0) + 1; count := count + 1; flag[roll] := TRUE; not_all_found := FALSE; FOR i FROM 1 TO 6 DO IF flag[i] = FALSE THEN not_all_found := TRUE FI OD OD; counttotal := counttotal + count OD; print(("Sim ",(fixed(counttotal/REAL(nloops),10,8))," theory = +14.7",new line)) Code:
$a68g main.alg Sim +14.752000 theory = +14.7 |
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24th May 2021, 2:01 pm | #78 | |
Heptode
Join Date: Feb 2021
Location: Edinburgh, Scotland, UK.
Posts: 528
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Re: Old Programming Language
[QUOTE=G6Tanuki;1377130]
Quote:
This talk has a lot more context... https://www.uknof.org.uk/uknof7/Reid-History.pdf I have some X25 reference cards somewhere... Coming back on topic, I think I was mostly using Fortran, C and Perl in that era. Only came across Algol once when I had to convert a program into a different language so I could use it. |
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24th May 2021, 4:12 pm | #79 | |
Dekatron
Join Date: Jun 2015
Location: Biggin Hill, London, UK.
Posts: 5,190
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Re: Old Programming Language
Quote:
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24th May 2021, 4:24 pm | #80 |
Dekatron
Join Date: Jan 2012
Location: Brentwood, Essex, UK.
Posts: 5,316
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Re: Old Programming Language
When I was a student at Cardiff in the late 1960's we used Algol. The stiff card of the 80 column punch cards made excellent dart flights! (I still have a few). The room where we deposited our stacks of cards and collected the print-out the following day was a good source of scrap paper for an impecunious student. Its scrap paper bin could usually be relied on to contain at least one stack of listing paper representing someone-else's unsuccessful run.
The year above us used to have to go up one of the valleys to use a National Coal Board computer, but we were able to use the college's own brand new one that was still in the process of being installed in what had been an ITV studio in Cardiff itself. They had retained the original high level viewing gallery from which you could see it in operation, with its cabinets, whirring tape drives, and flashing lights. For the first term, only the tangent function was operational, so equations with sine and cosine expresions had to be re-rewritten using tangent expansions. Last edited by emeritus; 24th May 2021 at 4:31 pm. Reason: typos |