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What was Coding like 40 years ago?
The Coding Train
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All the comments and stories posted to Hacker News that reference this video.Funny you should ask, this just showed up in my youtube feed yesterday:"What was Coding like 40 years ago?":
⬐ retrocryptidI wrote a bit if code on an Apple ][ (and a Commodore PET and C64) but I never took my computing device out for a picnic. Closest I came was bringing my HP 11C with me everywhere.⬐ JcorbaNone⬐ beardywI used to 'work from home' on and off in 1976 with a portable teletype. Two rubber cups would take a telephone handset. The keyboard and a roll of paper were my working environment. The very slow line speed was all the printer could keep up with.
Daniel Schiffman just started a video series about coding in Apple ][ BASIC on a vintage machine:
⬐ acomjeanI've seen them, they're quite fun. The intro montage is quite funny. The fact he has the beagle bros tips poster is magic.https://beagle.applearchives.com/the_posters/
Its funny how you remember some things. like how to fill the screen a single color. 10 hgr 20 hcolor=2 30 hplot 0,0, 40 call 62454
⬐ tiborsaas⬐ hbnI've never heard about Beagle bros, it's hilarious :)I've been loving this series and I hope he continues it.Being relatively young (25) and not living through the times of these classic computers, I knew the basic (heh) ideas behind programming for them, where the whole thing is essentially a REPL and you write line numbers to add to the program. But I never saw demos farther than printing a line and then doing a goto to print it infinitely. I didn't understand the actual workflow/iteration process programming for these machines, writing something more advanced where you're figuring things out as you go.
I have to say my conclusion is I'm glad that in modern times we have the ability to go back and insert as many lines as we want in between any other lines :)
⬐ vivegi~30 years ago:- Insert floppy disk into PC's Drive A: and boot DOS
- Insert Borland TurboPascal floppy disk into PC's Drive B: and run the Turbo Pascal IDE
- Edit program in IDE, save source code on C: drive folder
- Compile, Run, Test and repeat
- Swap out boot disk from Drive A:
- Insert data disk in Drive A:
- Copy sources from C: to A:
- Delete the files in C:
- Format another data disk (accidentally destroying the sources backed up in earlier step)
- Panic and look for Norton Utilities and run it to recover the source files from Drive C:
Fun times.
⬐ jleyankRJE terminals with remote card readers and line printers. Big honkin’ computer centres shared between organizations. Dreaming of Cray time. Excitement about the new Vax. SGI about to explode along with graphics engines. MIPS and megaflops. Incipient arpanet. Unix was new and amazing. Chess and checker programs and competitions. PLATO and other educational/multiuser environments. RMS and EMACS and the lisp machine war. Hackers inspired by mit. There’s more but that what I remember quickly. Forgot…. Lots of PDP-11’s.And everything was social. Admittedly the society was a little off but it was pleasant and supportive. Given that the hardware was shared there was no choice. The micros were starting but they hadn’t made things impersonal yet.
⬐ jschveibinzI once witnessed a girl transporting her Cobol code (card decks) to the computer center in a wagon.The wagon tipped over, and she just collapsed into a ball and cried. It was very sad.
⬐ jleyank⬐ cratermoonI suspect everybody did that once. Learned to sequence number things and draw a big black diagonal along there top of the deck. And ibm sorters…. Lots of rubber bands and keeping the card box. Like backups, “oh shit” is a harsh teacher.Chain printers loudly stamping 132-column printouts on pin-feed green bar paper.