RMweb Gold BoD Posted December 9, 2013 RMweb Gold Share Posted December 9, 2013 Not feeling too sprightly this morning after a bad nights sleep Must be something doing the rounds. I had a jippy stomach and didn't get to sleep until about half an hour before the alarm It's still a bit iffy so I may have to 'dash' from my class this morning. I made a point of not filling my time during the night by watching the cricket. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
AndyB Posted December 9, 2013 Share Posted December 9, 2013 Morning all and a misty one here. All this talk of ancient languages reminds me of my dad. Many decades ago (sorry, the 1960s) he started sharing computer program files using telephone lines between his college and one up in Manchester. He was very excited at the time as it was quite novel. I'm sure at the time we said it'd never catch on. The garage is now chocker with clobber so the chances of accessing my layouts is zero. This has led swmbo and myself taking some drastic decisions about the layouts' future. Our strategy of having me work on the 00 layout in the garage in the summer and a small N gauge layout that can be brought in doors during the winter hasn't really worked and neither of them really progresses. So, we've taken the decision to scrap the 00 layout and claim back the space in the garage. This might all sound gloomy, however, with a significant birthday next summer I've had permission granted and some budget to convert the garage in to a proper den (walls insulated and line, floor tiles, better lighting, beer fridge) with a reduced size baseboard hugging two walls at chest height (more storage space) that could make a fantastic space for an N gauge layout. Thanks in particular to Tony S for a bit of inspiration a week or so back about baseboard design. Tony, I'll be using that idea to help me break down any eventual layout into manageable chunks! First stage is to chuck out - ruthlessly - a load of stuff that for years has been gathering dust on the off chance it might be useful, or I had particular nostalgia for. Yoinks. Andy Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
RMweb Premium eldavo Posted December 9, 2013 RMweb Premium Share Posted December 9, 2013 You could earn good money with that - People who can program in COBOL are very thin on the ground the ground these days... Mostly pretty thin on top as well! I started with machine code, progressed to ALGOL, stepped back to BASIC then on to Fortran for several years mixed with a lot of work with various Assembler languages. COBOL was a short diversion for a year or two a long the way but I did manage to earn a living. The only problem with having these skills is that I would have to have a job to use them. Not at all sure I have the time for that sort of thing. Too much golf and toy trains to deal with! Mainframes! Don't get me started with them. First one I used had all of 64k words of memory. That is kilo not mega or giga. Also 24bit words not 8 bit bytes. Cheers Dave 2 Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
RMweb Gold Oldddudders Posted December 9, 2013 RMweb Gold Share Posted December 9, 2013 I have never programmed in COBOL, but I did work on a few projects in FORTRAN.BR developed its own dialect of FORTRAN, called TOPSTRAN, but I know nothing about such stuff. My Assistant's wife, however, about 34 years ago, was a BR programmer. 1 Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
RMweb Premium New Haven Neil Posted December 9, 2013 RMweb Premium Share Posted December 9, 2013 Mmm, I forgot to add a good morning to my earlier post. To be fair I was actually trying to work at the time, Monday mornings being what they are around here (a PIA...a weekends crime to catch up on) however it is coffee time now so I can add a good morning, and report a reasonably bright morning from Fraggle Rock. Well, it is now, but was still dark when I got to work as I'm an early starter. Even better, the team seem to be in a very upbeat mood this morning, always a good sign, the 'odd person out' is almost happy too, wonders will never cease. recent conversations seemingly having had a positive effect upon attitude. 1 Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Robert Posted December 9, 2013 Share Posted December 9, 2013 (edited) I must admit that I started work towards the end of the Mainframe era. I cut my teeth on a VAX cluster, and I've played around with some interesting architectures over the years like PDP-11 which has a very elegant instruction set. Most of my programming has been in C, but I have had excursions into Fortran, Forth, Java, PLM, Ada and various different assembler dialects. I have also been called a Dinosaur - but I still maintain that a lot of developers today would benefit from a better understanding of the underlying architecture. When writing mainframe software, you had to work with the time-slice you were given. When you wrote Z80 assembler you were restricted to 64k (excluding banking, of course). These days the solution is to throw more memory, or a more powerful CPU at the problem - rather than address why the code is inefficient/ running slowly. Edited December 9, 2013 by Robert Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
RMweb Gold beast66606 Posted December 9, 2013 RMweb Gold Share Posted December 9, 2013 Morning all. The heady days of early computing, I wrote my first code in Octal (base 8) on a PDP 11/01 where the machine code had to be dumped into the registers using key switches, it had 24k of memory and controlled a machine which used to crush samples and then calculate the load taken to do so, and therefore the strength of the material. I then moved on to Fortran (Formula Translation) 77 on a PDP 11/04 and, far more usefully, programming calculators to perform the routine calculations we were performing in the lab (steady Egor), then back to the 11/04 but this time in basic, again to simplify our routine work - all this was in the metallurgy department. I eventually got a job in the computer department and was part of a small team that wrote a uranium flask tracking system in COBOL (COmmon Business Orientated Language), this used to take 24 hours to compile ... one mistake and you were toast, especially if it was at the end. I then progressed through a bill of materials system, eventually linking this to CAD such that the draftsman could click on a component, confirm and all the necessary parts would be ordered - in the extreme this could start at the building and explode down to the smallest nuts and bolts - but we limited the level at which the ordering would work, to prevent "Oops Scotties" moments. Then into a company supplying software for the NHS, there's about a 50/50 chance that you (dear UK reader) have passed through my software somewhere, this was developed in a variety of languages, Pick, C, C++, Modula 2, Pascal and more - Nowadays I work in support. A dull day down here but the birds are having fun, the robin is chasing the tits and the tits are deploying decoys - amazing how quickly they adapt. Have a good day all. 1 Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
RMweb Premium New Haven Neil Posted December 9, 2013 RMweb Premium Share Posted December 9, 2013 'Passed through' the Beast....the mind boggles! Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
shortliner Posted December 9, 2013 Share Posted December 9, 2013 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-highlands-islands-25299988 6 Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
RMweb Gold BoD Posted December 9, 2013 RMweb Gold Share Posted December 9, 2013 Dunno about all of these fancy programming languages but we managed to print out a life size picture of Raquel Welsh on fanfold paper. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
RMweb Gold The Stationmaster Posted December 9, 2013 RMweb Gold Share Posted December 9, 2013 Dunno about all of these fancy programming languages but we managed to print out a life size picture of Raquel Welsh on fanfold paper. Hmm, that sounds like a much more useful skill - respect!! Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
RMweb Premium skipepsi Posted December 9, 2013 RMweb Premium Share Posted December 9, 2013 Dunno about all of these fancy programming languages but we managed to print out a life size picture of Raquel Welsh on fanfold paper. IT has not changed much has it....... Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
RMweb Gold Oldddudders Posted December 9, 2013 RMweb Gold Share Posted December 9, 2013 Raquel Welsh on fanfoldErrrmmmm...... Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Robert Posted December 9, 2013 Share Posted December 9, 2013 (edited) IT has not changed much has it....... No... (I've removed the ASCII art picture of me - it took up too much room...) Raquel Welsh would probably have been better... Edited December 9, 2013 by Robert Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
RMweb Gold BoD Posted December 9, 2013 RMweb Gold Share Posted December 9, 2013 IT has not changed much has it....... I'm not too sure todays 'consumers' would be happy with graphics made up from the characters on an impact printer though. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
RMweb Gold grandadbob Posted December 9, 2013 RMweb Gold Share Posted December 9, 2013 Good afternoon all, Lovely sunny day, 9oC & all appears to be well in my part of the world. Late on parade today as "we" decided that we needed to get out to the shops early. I have now been released from duty & have been catching up although it's taken some time as some posts appear to be written in a foreign language! Have a good one, Bob. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
RMweb Premium Barry O Posted December 9, 2013 RMweb Premium Share Posted December 9, 2013 Afternoon 10C here - and quite mild... Been a bit busy soi far today sorting out Buildings Society things, painting ceilings etc I remember at Leeds Uni we had a DEC 10 mainframe plus a KDF9 and an ICL1904T (ah good memories of "george" and bad memories of punched cards...) Set off using Fortran 4 and Algol 60, then onwards and ... sideways... it does help sometimes to be able to dive into DOS when the laptop misbehaves.. Have a nice day everyone and enjoy Monday. Barry 1 Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Two_sugars Posted December 9, 2013 Share Posted December 9, 2013 YEP . . .those were the days, , punch card input and don't trip carrying the stack ! ! ! ! ! ! ! 3 Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
RMweb Gold Tony_S Posted December 9, 2013 RMweb Gold Share Posted December 9, 2013 I've just had a phone call from the doctor's surgery and I'm now required to present myself at Southend Hospital on Wednesday for another blood test, this time GTT, which isn't gin and double tonic but a glucose tolerance test. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
RMweb Gold beast66606 Posted December 9, 2013 RMweb Gold Share Posted December 9, 2013 YEP . . .those were the days, , punch card input and don't trip carrying the stack ! ! ! ! ! ! ! We also used paper tape - hundreds of foot of it, get that jammed and riiiippp and then we had to walk across the site (it was 1 mile long) to punch another one - which took an hour - the joys of waiting for computing. 1 Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
bbishop Posted December 9, 2013 Share Posted December 9, 2013 Tony, Take plenty to read. Bill Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
shortliner Posted December 9, 2013 Share Posted December 9, 2013 (edited) I've just had a phone call from the doctor's surgery and I'm now required to present myself at Southend Hospital on Wednesday for another blood test, this time GTT, which isn't gin and double tonic but a glucose tolerance test. Is that the one where they make you drink an extreemly large amount of glucose in water (yeuck!) and then take blood from your earlobe every 10 minutes for the next couple of hours? - if so, definitely take a book! Edited December 9, 2013 by shortliner Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
RMweb Premium New Haven Neil Posted December 9, 2013 RMweb Premium Share Posted December 9, 2013 (edited) Oh, olde worlde computers raised a memory in this middle aged computer phobic - at the school I 'attended' we had a computer with valves - entirely thermionic valve driven, it had cards with three little valves on each. There was a whole room full of the banks, and another room with rotary converters of some kind in it. I think Stella Power Station had to put another set on line each time it was used, it also had a full time technicial to attend to it's foibles, which were many. I seem to recall it was gifted to the school (a grammar technical) by a local firm who had updated! After my first year it disappeared during the summer holidays, the school electronics club having had a zillion components donated to it! Ooh, it's name has just re-surfaced, 'Pegasus'. We learned basic BASIC and made programmes in 5 hole tape to run on it, mostly unsuccessfully! Memories..... edit IIRC it was a Ferranti. Edited December 9, 2013 by New Haven Neil Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
RMweb Premium New Haven Neil Posted December 9, 2013 RMweb Premium Share Posted December 9, 2013 Google was my friend.... http://nysa.cx/gallery/science_museum_20050722,computing,pegasus Exactly like that! 1 Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
shortliner Posted December 9, 2013 Share Posted December 9, 2013 .....and then along came Clive Sinclair! Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
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