My first programming language was PL/C, a dialect of PL/I used at Cornell, on an IBM System 370 accessed via 029 punch cards in the early 70s. My first course was actually taught by Conway and Gries. PL/C is a strongly typed language that should encourage good programming practices. It also tried to correct typos during compilation, which can improve turnaround. I quickly moved to Fortran for useful work and still use it today when I need a quick answer via gfortran on an iMac. Used C for some stuff but mostly Fortran with OpenMP and the MPI library for parallel programming. Learned Pascal in graduate school (had to) but never did any real work with it. At one time I was pretty proficient with Z80 assembly.
Here is the definitive article on programmers and programming languages:
Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal
Systems I used:
IBM System 370 (MVS)
IBM System 360/195 (MVS plus TSO)
Amdahl V6 (CMS)
NAS 9000 (MVS plus TSO)
DEC PDP11/34 (RSX11M)
DEC System10 (TOPS10)
CDC STAR 100 (VSOS)
CDC CYBER 203 (VSOS)
CDC CYBER 205 (VSOS)
Various CDC 60-bit scalar machines (NOS)
Cray X-MP (UNICOS)
Cray Y-MP (UNICOS)
Cray 2 (UNICOS)
Cray C90 (UNICOS)
Cray T90 (UNICOS)
Cray T3D (UNICOS and microkernel)
IBM SP2/pSeries Clusters - various flavors of POWER processors and interconnect fabrics (AIX)
SiCortex SC (Unix)
Thinking Machines CM-2 (Sun OS on front-end)
Intel and AMD based x86-64 Infiniband clusters, some with GPUs, from IBM, Linux Networx, Sun Microsystems, and SGI (Linux)
Quote:
Originally Posted by CoachKandSportsguy
How computing all started for the masses
I remember using basic in the early 1970s in high school, along with one other program on a Digital PDP 8i computer, in my schools basement.
https://youtu.be/WYPNjSoDrqw
If you are old enough and geeky enough, you should recognize a few of these names. |