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By PaulB
#1540365
Just seen this fab photo shared on Twitter....

There are a few IT bod here who may appreciate it..


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By johnm
FLYER Club Member  FLYER Club Member
#1540367
She did the on board machines I think, but there was a huge bank of Univac 1108s if I remember rightly where the assemblers, compilers and simulators ran. Probably written Fortan I should think
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By Josh
#1540373
The AGC code was (hand) written mostly directly in assembly language though the more complex guidance functions for powered flight in the lunar module had a software interpreter to make programming the vector calculus easier.

There are a few good if very geeky and techy books on the computer and its architecture. The oft-quoted line about calculator/mobile phone having more computing power then the Apollo computers ignores the fact that they were using bleeding edge technology and created a robust and reliable system from first principles, and along the way invented most of the basic concepts that underpin software architecture today.
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#1540598
Interesting to see the source code style, it's very similar to what I aspired to when programming in DG NOVA Assembly a decade later. Almost every line has a comment saying what it does.

It's possible to get these machines to run well beyond what you would expect from the cycle time and memory size. We did some very advanced stuff in 64K * 16 bits of memory with a 20 MHz clock, it took a lot of generic PC code to get close.
By Cns416
#1540601
I had the pleasure of submitting overnight batch runs on ICL 1900's at University
Programs too big ( in cpu time used) to be submitted to the daily running batch queues had to be run overnight when the computer could be dedicated to running one program at a time.
If you tried to run it in the daily queues it would simply stop when it used up a certain CPU time - so there was no way of sliding it though unnoticed during the day.
Of course if the program had a bug in it the result the next morning was a few lines of unhelpful error listings rather than 20 pages of sprocket fed line-printer output. So fixing a failure/bug became a lengthy process!
Sometimes if I was lucky the bug was early in the run sequence so I could run it during the day knowing it would encounter the problem before the cpu day limit was reached.
(Not my program I'd hasten to add it was done as part of a PhD thesis. - I was modifying it and making it work properly at the same time - A Fortran mega number cruncher.
#1540604
My programming started when I was an undergraduate at Lancaster, 1966 to 1969. Filling in coding sheets that girls (I suppose) would transcribe to paper tape. With great effort it was possible to get three runs a day.

This was in Algol 60 - a precursor to Pascal - and as Cns says an error generated a rather unhelpful message and vast amounts of core dump.

I ended up writing fast Fourier Transform code - from a Meuthen Monograph. Goodness knows how long it took to run. No one raised the slightest objection but I wonder if that was because I was the only one in the Environmental Sciences department doing any significant computing. It was a long time ago and maybe I did need to run it overnight.
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By davelee212
FLYER Club Member  FLYER Club Member
#1540686
I'm not sure I could get away with calling it "programming" but the first thing I remember typing codes into a computer for was a robotic "turtle" connected to a BBC Micro that had a pen in it that you could put down on the paper and draw stuff... very slowly... great fun!

I've been learning a bit of Python recently (I'm still not a programmer, but dabble with automation/rest apis) and stumbled upon a turtle module that lets you draw with a virtual turtle. So paper required, no cables and he can draw in different colours. 25 years of progress! :D

Dave
#1542477
I called in at the NASA museum in Huntsville recently and was shown around by a delightful elderly gentleman who had been a design engineer on the Saturn V and now volunteers as a guide. I asked him what he and his colleagues thought of the film 'Hidden Figures' and he told me he thought it was "very plausible" except that he didn't remember the segregated toilets!

These people were, and are, giants of engineering in every sense. If you get the chance, do visit the Huntsville museum. There's more detail, and personal anecdotes, than you could ever imagine.
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By kanga
#1542580
David Viewing wrote:I called in at the NASA museum in Huntsville .. a delightful elderly gentleman who had been a design engineer..asked him what he and his colleagues thought of the film 'Hidden Figures' and he told me he thought it was "very plausible" except that he didn't remember the segregated toilets! ...


At a DoD facility in Maryland in early '80s one of my colleagues was a by then elderly (in her late '50s!) black lady. She recalled that Federal offices in Maryland and DC did not have segregated toilets, but those in Virginia which she occasionally visited on duty did. Maryland still had segregated schools for some time after Jones vs Topeka, but that was a State not a Federal issue, and State Assembly tried to delay inplementing Supreme Court decision. In Virginia 'miscegenation' was a State crime for a long time. It was reported quite recently that an elderly mixed couple who had had to flee North to marry in the '50s or '60s discovered that there was still an outstanding State Arrest Warrant against them (no Statute of Limitations for the original offence, even though the law had been rescinded).

My colleague recalled that her granddaughter had learnt in school about the internment and forced resettlement inland of Japanese Americans living on the West Coast during WW2. She had told the girl that her first job on leaving High School in DC during the War dad been in the Federal office dealing with the internment. 'But Granny, how could you ?' Granny had to explain that for a black girl in DC with a High School Certificate there were few employment opportunities and no chance of any sort of university or college, and a Federal junior clerical job in a new and expanding office, with low but reliable pay and pension, seemed like a godsend.
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By OCB
#1542628
:shock:

Never really went in for Yank bashing, but "Land of the Free, Home of the Brave"...yeah. Let's not mention the British Anthem lyrics though !

I have to say that "Roots" - even though I was young - shocked me. I had family who moved back from Canada to Scotland around the same time Roots was on TV and they brought over some reading material that showed "Cowboys and Indians" in a very different light to what John Wayne presented, stuff that simply wasn't available in UK libraries etc.

Is WWII internment seen in the US as a stain on the national soul? I honestly have no idea.

My maternal grandparents moved out to the States in the mid 20s on the "Irish" ticket. One of my aunts was then born out there. I know they didn't have a very good experience, and gave up as the Depression kicked in.
I wouldn't be here today if they had made a success out of it :oops:
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By kanga
#1542633
OCB wrote:..

Is WWII internment seen in the US as a stain on the national soul? I honestly have no idea.

..


As usual in the US, it probably depends on where and among whom you are. The granddaughter was in school in Maryland, where it was clearly by then being taught in class as history and somewhat shameful history. Elsewhere, who knows?

At that time, '80s, Martin Luther King's birthday was not a Federal holiday. In all States North of Maryland on the East Coast it was a State and school holiday. In all South of MD it it was not. In MD it varied County by County whether it was a school holiday. We lived in the southernmost County where it was, and children were taught all about MLK and the Civil Rights struggles of the '60s. The stories about segregated water fountains and riding in the backs of 'buses greatly mystified our eldest in First Grade. His headteacher, his Home Room teacher, the firefighter and the police officer who came to teach them about home and Street safety were all black, as were about a third of his class. The very local, ie Town, paper regularly carried stories of teams for sports, debating, chess etc from the local High School having difficulties or embarrassment or overt hostility when they visited schools further south in the State because they were mixed.

Back to topic: 80-column coding sheets, punched Hollerith cards, FORTRAN, batch processing yielding 132-column printout on fanfold, optimising by Assembler subroutines and Overlays in LinkEdit steps, some paperwork input and output, occasional setting register contents with toggle switches, and even one valve-driven computer .. ah, nostalgia!
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By OCB
#1542647
Working for IBM in the early 90s - they still had "old kit" lying around.
Upright washing machine storage devices, real terminals (not "emulators"), tape reels etc.
I did find a few boxes of punch cards and a small forest of tractor feed. Lordy - they even had a technical library with 2 full time librarians!

Many of my colleagues were "oldies" - who had started on punch cards etc. Plenty of stories about being set up as junior programmers, put onto night shift batch loading - and having a card loader deliberately set up to eject rather than load by the previous shift etc, or having tapes spewing out several dozen feet of expensive brown shiny sellotape per second..

A couple of them were nothing short of geniuses. One little "granny" - with a self-confessed family orchard rather than tree - had helped write SQL. I don't mean she could code in SQL - that she could do like something out of the Matrix - she actually *wrote* parts of the various SQL standards.

I think I've said it on here before. Some of our batch procedures were chewing up more and more overnight mainframe CPU time. It got to the point where Ingrid's jobs were getting squeezed. After a couple of such events she decided to have a look at our team's (of 7 full time coders) work.

One procedure she got down from about 200 lines (not SQL - mainframe procedures) and 1h of mainframe processing to 17 lines and about 4 minutes of CPU. She had basically internalised and visualised every available table, with indexing between them - what temporary tables were created via the plethora of overnight jobs, and what DB2/SQL were best to extract the "goods" with minimal impact.

She did it over a couple of afternoons in between her "real" work.

We just stood there - gawping - as she explained what she'd done. It was about that time that IBM had given her a shiny crystal ornament for her 30 years of service. :shock:
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