Does anyone remember some of the old programming languages?

Question

Such as SPS, Autocoder, FORTRAN, RPG

Does anyone remember punching up the program into cards and compiling them through a card reader?

Answer 1

Ah, a nostalgia buff! Yes, I do. My first professional programming job, in the late 1960's, was writing assembly language (GAP = General Assembly Program) for the GE-225 series. I coded in pencil and punched my own cards.

Previous to that I had learned some Fortran while in high school, working on IBM 7090 series computers.

The GE-225 was considered a small mainframe in those days. It had a whopping 8K of 20-bit words (yes, I really mean 8 thousand not 8 million), a 1000 cpm card reader, 300 cpm card punch, and a bank of 8 tape drives. No disk or other random access storage. I doubt you can find a memory chip that small these days, not even in a pocket calculator. This memory was actual core, little magnetic toruses wired to a big circuit board. The CPU used transistors, but they hadn't figured out how to make transistor-based memory stable enough at that time. It was just around the corner, I think, when the IBM system 360's hit the scene - the first 3rd generation computers, meaning all-transistor.

Of course, there was no room for an operating system in memory. One program ran at a time. You could line up several in a row in the card reader if you put the right binary loader cards in between.

Answer 2

I remember my days in college in the early 1980's when there was no "computer science" degree. We were all math majors looking into programming. I used to have to book time on the computer in the college lab that had less memory than my cell phone today. We patiently waited to enter our batch cards, and then looked to see when our batch would be run. If we were late in the lab there was a fine, after all computer time was very valuable in the 1980's. The process took at least a week. My final project in Pascal programming was a batch to find the volume of a can with a given height and diameter. A program I could easily enter into a single line in Excel today!
As a side note, the chad produced from the punch cards was highly charged with static and would stick to anything. We put it into vinyl record covers and blew it under the doors at the dorms. What a mess!

Answer 3

Sure. In 1968 University of Illinois had an IBM 1094 to which students could submit jobs. Punch them up on an 026 or 029 card reader. I used to use Fortran II in those days. Drop your deck? Run them though the sorter, if you had bothered to number them. Of course the sorter might spindle and mutilate a few in the process. Those were the bad old days.

Answer 4

I remember Fortran, but my first class at college was the first semester they stopped using the punch cards, so I didn't have that fun experience.

Answer 5

Remember the nasty operator who put a loose rubberband on the deck, then the cards would fly out of the middle? And they only did it when you did not number them.

What about WAT4, Assembler (I actually liked it), APL, BASIC, COBOL, JCL, PLI, SAS.

Wait, before DOS was CPM and of course APPLE

Man, such memories...those were the good old days.

Whoa Steve, you are even older then me. I did assembler 360.

I used to also work on a Burroughs where we had to load the disk packs, those suckers were heavy. Gee I forgot the DEC.

Wow times have changed.

Answer 6

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Answer 7

Ever drop a deck of punch cards and have to put them back in order to boot the system?

Answer 8

Well, I never used cards, but I know how to thread a reel to reel tape through the heads and onto the takeup reel. And how about a shout-out for FORTH!

Answer 9

Not sure what the last guy meant by DOS and Hexidecimal...?? How about Simula `67 and Ada.

Answer 10

DOS, Cobal, hexadecimal. and basic