Re: My Vintage Dream PC

You should learn some of the things Einstein stated.

Don't clutter your mind, Johnny.

Usually a re-IPL would be the way to go.

Burrough's machines ran ALGOL, and never had an assembler. The Algol compiler was written in Algol, and two guys hand-compiled the first compiler directly to machine code.

Fine, as long as it never has bugs that corrupt the real database.

Then you've been lucky. And I guess careful.

John

WHY? Why on earth didn't they write the first version as a cross-compiler? Hand-compiling a compiler to machine code seems like one of the most amazingly inefficient exercises in mascochism I've ever heard of.

Using a VCS is one of the most elementary ways of being careful.

Don't know. Maybe they didn't have a computer.

John

Burroughs Computer Systems was the first Mainframe I ever saw as a field trip in high school vocational electronics course. That was back when a 15 foot long dot matrix printout of Santa and His Reindeer was a really big deal to them as they had it proudly displayed for us.

Turns out that over ten years later, it was the first mainframe computer I worked with in an employment setting as well. Pretty cool.They were talking about porting its MRP system to a 386, which had just hit the scene. I was doing Lotus spreadsheets, and laying out PCBs in 4X and via AUTOCAD v2 on a 286 onto mylar on a pen plotter, then to a reduction camera, which we also had in house.

Ahh... the days of sepias and blueprints that really were blue.

I still draw my schematics on vellum, and the blueprints are still blue.

John

You have got to be joking. Doing real live blueprints today makes as much sense as if I put out my assignments on ditto.

I figured the delirium was due to something. Vapor phase degreaser fumes and Ammonia fumes. Bwuahahahahahaha! You can take a joke, right?

You, the one that said I haven't been doing this for a living?

You deserve far less credence than I give you for that.

Nope. You can have working code and then crash boomers by just adding a patch.

/BAH

Or it was a master's class assignment.

/BAH

One of my lecturers at University, Torgil Ekman , as his Licenciate(*) thesis wrote an Algol compiler for the computer at the university at the time, SMIL . This was in 1962. There was never an assembler for this machine; he wrote the compiler in machine code. The compiler itself was never written in Algol either, so it could not be cross-compiled or -assembled.

(*) Licenciate is a post-graduate degree available in Sweden, halfway between Master and Doctor.

Best wishes,

// Christian Brunschen

It doesn't make any more sense as an assignment. You have sophomores hand-assemble a few lines to get the point across, and then move on.

Read "Showstopper!" It's amazing... hundreds of coders wrote code, hundreds of testers compiled and ran the code and found the bugs. They didn't like one another.

We just finished a successful programming project. It was successful because we had one person programming, one person managing them and checking everything they did. The programmers was very good, generating only about 5 bugs a day on average, and the manager was better.

John

In other words, it was successful because it was very small.

Or, in any practical sense, modified.

Even in 1962, this just sounds insane to me. Once the first assembler was developed (for whatever machine that was), there should never have been another serious program written in raw machine code...

I'm not joking.

ftp://jjlarkin.lmi.net/RainyDay.jpg

I think better on a piece of big paper than I do on a tiny screen. I keep the originals forever, with side notes, node voltages, graphs of expected behavior, flow charts... basically documenting design intent. And I can draw anything without having to stop and create a library part first. I do this for hardware and software and mechanical designs.

ftp://jjlarkin.lmi.net/Auto.jpg

After I do a design, I make a blueprint and give it to my one of my cad kids to enter in Pads or Solidworks or VHDL or whatever, and grind out the details.

Lately I've also been writing on whiteboards and taking photos, for things like figures in proposals. The customers are amused... sometimes the frame and pen trays show.

"My assignments"? Are you a teacher? Of what?

John

There never *was* an assembler for this machine. The machine code was simple enough that that was what people learned. Once the Algol compiler was there, there was no further need for any intermediary language between the two.

Best wishes,

// Christian Brunschen

But ditto smells so good.