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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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Old 4th Dec 2020, 3:40 pm   #41
Slothie
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I learnt "assembler" programming in CAGE - The City & Guilds Engine if I remember correctly. It was run on a local colleges mainframe using an emulator and was used by all computer studies courses examined by the City & Guilds organisation. It was similar to CESIL in concept. In my 6th form I wrote an interpreter for it in Algol that run on the schools newly acquired Research Machines 380Z. I was flattered to learn that students in the years following me used it to do their coursework for several years after I left the school - it was much easier using my interpreter program on the 380Z than sending off punched cards to the college! Eventually the schools PETs and 380Z were retired in favour of BBC Micros and the odd IBM machine.

https://iclces.uk/articles/city_and_...onic_code.html

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Old 4th Dec 2020, 7:55 pm   #42
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Wow - snap my first real programming job (unpaid) was to write a CESIL interpreter on the loaned TRS80 from the maths teacher so it was quicker and more interactive for students to practice - one of the first sold products for Gilsoft was ZX81, Spectrum and Dragon versions of that program for Schools... The RML380Z was locked in a small room so the TRS80 was able to be in the class...
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Old 4th Dec 2020, 8:23 pm   #43
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I suppose nowadays its so easy to teach low-level programming on microcontrollers but back then these psuedo-assembler languages really showed you how the hardware worked in a way that programming in BASIC or COBOL (!) couldn't. Nowadays its probably not something that much time is spent on.
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Old 4th Dec 2020, 10:09 pm   #44
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I suppose nowadays its so easy to teach low-level programming on microcontrollers
Not really done these days, it's all in "C", OK you can go down to bits and bytes this isn't done much as there are many (free) libraries of functions. Manufacturers like Microchip heavily push thier free compilers and development environments to sell their chips. Good on them it makes hobby use easy.
 
Old 9th Dec 2020, 6:47 pm   #45
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I think the OP question may refer to CPL that was developed and discussed in this fascinating article as it makes specific mention of the elimination of an asterisk...

https://arstechnica.com/features/202...e-origins-of-c

I would encourage you to watch the linked video as well as the origin of the Job Queue and the operation of the library of routines 'pasted' into the code as it is punched is also very interesting...
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Old 9th Dec 2020, 9:38 pm   #46
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As a student back in the early 80's at Exeter, some of the 3rd year students who were writing compilers used BCPL (The cut down version of CPL) to write the Pascal compiler and the editor we used for our coursework on the NORD-100 minicomputer the department owned. Although I was interested in its low-level nature I never really got to use BCPL as my projects didn't use it, and so I didn't really recognise the lineage of C when I started using that much later (after I graduated I first joined a VAX Software house who mainly used Macro-32, FORTRAN and COBOL). I did all my system-level programming in FORTRAN like a real man!
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Old 9th Dec 2020, 10:14 pm   #47
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I did all my system-level programming in FORTRAN like a real man!
Surely a "real man" did all his system programming in assembly language - or even better, machine code!
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Old 9th Dec 2020, 10:18 pm   #48
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I did all my system-level programming in FORTRAN like a real man!
Surely a "real man" did all his system programming in assembly language - or even better, machine code!
Absolutely - poking in numbers from the back of the ZX81 manual...

... graduated to a monitor at some point as well -pure luxury.

Had my eyes opened to how the rest of the world lived with Linking MACRO assemblers when I had access the the Alpha and its onboard tools to write code for the WD16 in college.
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Old 9th Dec 2020, 10:44 pm   #49
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I did all my system-level programming in FORTRAN like a real man!
Surely a "real man" did all his system programming in assembly language - or even better, machine code!
While I know what you mean, machine code and assembler real put me off. Yes I could just about do it back in the day but maybe I'm not a real person because I chose not to?

I've programmed in various high level languages. Started with BASIC, then was taught FORTRAN PASCAL and finally C. Now C I got, and something I worked with for many years (CAPL) was so based on C that it continued. Then Arduino came along and just reinforced my preference for it as a high level language. It has it's limitations and risks (dare i mention MISRA?) but has been the longest serving language I've consistently used.
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Old 10th Dec 2020, 1:26 am   #50
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I have programmed professionally in a number of languages over the 35ish years Ive worked, but most of it was in C and since the early 2000's Python, although I've done my dues with javascript, HTML, CSS et al and some more obscure languages like OpenROAD, QuickBasic and GraduATE (An automation language for automatic test equipment).

Writing system level programs in Assembler/Machine code is too much like using an appropriate tool for the job!
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Old 20th May 2021, 11:13 pm   #51
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When I started as a postgrad student in 1978, Oxford was still using an ICL1906A mainframe which was uppercase only, though it was in the process of being retired.
As an aside, Oxford Polytechnic (now Oxford Brookes University) also had some flavour of ICL 1900 (I don't remember the exact model) when I was there in the early 1970s, which was where I fed my efforts at COBOL.

By the way, a bit of further investigation has revealed that FORTRAN has now officially been renamed as Fortran, dropping the earlier insistence upon capitals. As you say, this presumably reflects the move away from early computers with their restricted character sets. COBOL however, being an acronym, is still capitalised.
We had some ICL system at De-Havilland College, Borehamwood funny we spent more time using the DEC system-10 at Hatfield Polytechnic (now The University of Hertfordshire (UOH)) in 1980/81 by then the Research Machines 380Z based on the Z80 were just coming online. we did a number programming languages starting with machine code , Fortran , Basic and COBOL.

As for COBOL we would code our programs on 80 columns coding sheets, they were sent to Hatfield Polytechnic to be put on to punched cards then put forward as a batch job to compile and run.

I don't think I ever got a COBOL program to run with out error's, talking to a younger guy about unix he could not understand why we had ED the line editor. Now we have large screens a mouse and touch screens how much easer to develop a program.

That writing your program on paper and sending to hatfield took days between edits and test run's.

Other funny thing many years later the DEC sales rep to Hatfield Polytechnic became a colleague (At Convex computes mid 90's) and friend.
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Old 21st May 2021, 12:26 am   #52
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Somewhere I have a description of one particular programming language from the 60s that the writer described as "cryptic, powerful, and where a command line looks like a burst of transmission line noise"

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.

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Old 21st May 2021, 7:55 am   #53
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Somewhere I have a description of one particular programming language from the 60s that the writer described as "cryptic, powerful, and where a command line looks like a burst of transmission line noise"
That sounds like a description of APL (short for "A Programming Language").
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Old 21st May 2021, 8:13 am   #54
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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
If that was the one in the computer dept , I remember it well, walking across the road from the Faraday building with a stack of punch cards for a field solver written in FORTRAN (and trying not to drop them). Then going back a few hours later and hoping it had run without error.
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Old 21st May 2021, 6:20 pm   #55
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I have some leaflets about the Leo III computer and its peripherals. The one for the "Data Processing System" says:

"Programs may be written in CLEO (Clear Language for Expressing Orders) or Intercode. Both languages can deal equally with mathematical and commercial procedures. "

No examples of these languages are provided in the leaflets. Only upper-case letters were available.

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.

Last edited by emeritus; 21st May 2021 at 6:23 pm. Reason: typos
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Old 21st May 2021, 7:00 pm   #56
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I have some leaflets about the Leo III computer and its peripherals.
The Centre for Computing History in Cambridge are doing a lottery-funded project to preserve information about the LEO computers. You might want to check with them to see if they have copies / scans of those leaflets, since its exactly the sort of thing they are looking for.

(I'm not associated with the museum, but I have donated magazines to them in the past).
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Old 21st May 2021, 7:05 pm   #57
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STC's "Zebra" computer was interesting:

https://www.computerhistory.org/broc...4372956d6b611/

https://collection.sciencemuseumgrou...r-minicomputer

https://www.liverpool.ac.uk/~cmi/physics/computers.html
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Old 21st May 2021, 7:57 pm   #58
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Thanks for the links, especially the third. I did once get to see the Woolwich Poly computer in operation, and remember seeing the row(s) of CRT screens, AFAIR each with multiple traces. I later wondered if they might have been a type of CRT memory, but it seems that they were just displaying register contents rather than functioning as the registers.

I will scan the Leo III leafets later: they are only single sheets.
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Old 21st May 2021, 8:15 pm   #59
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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
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Old 21st May 2021, 8:47 pm   #60
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Yes, I was wondering about that. Did Craig mean FORTRAN 77?

According to Wikipedia, it went:
FORTRAN
FORTRAN II
FORTRAN III
FORTRAN IV
FORTRAN 66
FORTRAN 77
Fortran 90
Fortran 95
Fortran 2003
Fortran 2008
Fortran 2018

I must admit that I was unaware of the 21st-century versions.
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