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Old 21st May 2021, 9:01 pm   #61
Slothie
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Default Re: Old Programming Language

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Originally Posted by emeritus View Post
When I was a student, in the summer of 1968 I had a very rewarding 3 month placement in the STC Submarine Cables lab at North Woolwich. Their filter designing was carried out by running programs on a computer that STC had donated to Woolwich Polytechnic. It was called something like Stantech Zebra. I am not sure now if that was the name of the computer or its programming language as I was never involved in programming it.
I had a look around and found this quite interesting document, including some lovely period photos of ladies operating the computer.

http://archive.computerhistory.org/r....102646082.pdf
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Old 21st May 2021, 9:17 pm   #62
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I must admit that I was unaware of the 21st-century versions.
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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Old 22nd May 2021, 12:07 am   #63
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Default Re: Old Programming Language

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Quote:
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I must admit that I was unaware of the 21st-century versions.
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.
Also a lot of the computer-aided engineering (CAE) sim codes are in FORTRAN like Dyna3D (one application of Dyna3D is Crashworthiness simulations ) other include CFD codes, digital wind tunnels etc....
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Old 22nd May 2021, 8:00 am   #64
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Default Re: Old Programming Language

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And I go back to the day of punch card programming in Fortran74 and Algol68,, where if you used more than 32k of core store you had to get written permission. That was an ICL mainframe at Southampton University. More computing power in a fitbit now.

Craig
I have never heard of a Fortran74
Misremembered - it was Fortran IV. Fortran 77 did not come out until I'd finished my degree.

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.

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Old 22nd May 2021, 8:32 am   #65
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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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Old 22nd May 2021, 10:11 am   #66
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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.
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Old 22nd May 2021, 8:06 pm   #67
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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.
Attached Files
File Type: pdf Leo III.pdf (592.9 KB, 66 views)
File Type: pdf 1040 Printer.pdf (828.7 KB, 54 views)
File Type: pdf Lector.pdf (393.1 KB, 45 views)

Last edited by emeritus; 22nd May 2021 at 8:10 pm. Reason: typos
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Old 23rd May 2021, 10:58 am   #68
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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 !
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Old 23rd May 2021, 11:51 am   #69
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Originally Posted by GeraldSommariva View Post
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 !
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
(Done using Online Fortran Compiler https://www.tutorialspoint.com/compi...ran_online.php)
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Old 23rd May 2021, 12:11 pm   #70
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Default 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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Old 23rd May 2021, 1:48 pm   #71
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Default Re: Old Programming Language

There is more information about Elliott Autocode here.
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Old 23rd May 2021, 1:59 pm   #72
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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
I didn't know about Codingground, interesting, hoped to see Postscript.

Last edited by wireman; 23rd May 2021 at 2:13 pm.
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Old 23rd May 2021, 2:42 pm   #73
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For the purists I would avoid the nonstandard rand() and in this case I don't mind using count as a variable...

I didn't know about Codingground, interesting, hoped to see Postscript.
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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Old 23rd May 2021, 6:46 pm   #74
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Default Re: Old Programming Language

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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.
.
One of my clients ran a Convex C-1 back in the late-1980s: it was an apparently-cheap alternative to buying-time on CRAYs etc but porting optimised-for Cray-parallelism code to the Convex was never easy; for 'fast turnround' jobs they still often had to rent Cray-time.

[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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Old 23rd May 2021, 8:12 pm   #75
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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.
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Old 23rd May 2021, 8:37 pm   #76
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Default Re: Old Programming Language

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There is more information about Elliott Autocode here.
Thanks, that brought back a few memories from a long time ago.
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Old 23rd May 2021, 10:23 pm   #77
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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).
The Dice Problem vintage ALGOL 68 (1968) :-
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
Done using Online Algol Compiler https://www.tutorialspoint.com/execute_algol_online.php
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Old 24th May 2021, 2:01 pm   #78
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[QUOTE=G6Tanuki;1377130]
Quote:
Originally Posted by GeraldSommariva View Post
At
[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]
I remember this era, JNT PADs, Pink Book, sendmail configs...
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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Old 24th May 2021, 4:12 pm   #79
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I remember this era, JNT PADs, Pink Book, sendmail configs...
This talk has a lot more context...

https://www.uknof.org.uk/uknof7/Reid-History.pdf

I have some X25 reference cards somewhere...
I have a jnt-pad upstairs... Some time back I was asking here about repairing a Weir power supply, that was the one in the jnt-pad.
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Old 24th May 2021, 4:24 pm   #80
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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
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