Ever wonder how they did computing before computers?

[Spectric]

It's somewhat sobering to remember that I have in fact used punch-cards to write Computer Programs in COBOL !!

That is giving your age away, my memories of obsolete programing languages are Fortran and Modula 2, C was such a blessing.

 

[J-G]

That is giving your age away, my memories of obsolete programing languages are Fortran and Modula 2, C was such a blessing.

I doubt that it is still the case but I was told only a few years ago that there were more programs written in COBOL than all other languages put together, simply because it was in use for so long and started so early.

Modula 2 still has a following but my preference now is Pascal, compared to C it can be read and understood by anyone with a modicum of intelegence

 

[Spectric]

compared to C it can be read and understood by anyone with a modicum of intelegence

I don't think you can blame C itself for having this reputation, it is the programer who chooses to write in such a style and often without sufficient comments in their code but then it is C that allows them to write in such a way! If I remember correctly Borlands Delphi was Pascal based and that was great for software that required HMI's but most of my work was embedded software, control for Motors, Invertors and the like. Having recently got back into some programing I can say that these new microcontrollers are amazing devices and so fast, plus the days of expensive development tools from the likes of Introl and Green Hills have been replaced by software that is free to download. My only gripe is that many younger programers have become as I call them " Lego programers" because they essentially just use collections of pre defined functions rather than having to start with basically nothing, writing their own register definition files and make files which I think gives a better and deeper understanding of the hardware being used.

 

[J-G]

I have no doubt that C - and its variants - are useful, I just can't be bothered to make myself think that '{' actually means 'begin' !

Yes, Delphi is in fact Object Oriented Pascal which grew out of Turbo Pascal. I used Turbo Pascal for many years under DOS but my first Pascal Compiler was Nascom Pascal in 1980/1 - can't be 100% sure of the date. I know that I bought my first Disc Drive in December 1980 (5¼" single side, 170kb) but there wasn't a Disk Operating System available, the only facilities I had were to 'Seek' a Track Nº, then a 'Sector' Nº and read or write 128 bytes. This gave me a useful understanding of the very basic working of a Disc Drive.

With this I wrote a Point-of-Sale Stock Control & Till system for my DIY shop, handling some 12000 items which was later updated using Turbo Pascal.

Now I use Free Pascal combined with Lazarus to write various 'Windows' Data processing or Information systems just for the fun of it including my Accounting Suite, Vehicle Costs, Solar Panel & Power Use analysis. My current project concerns measurement of Screw Threads.

 

[gcusick]

I have no doubt that C - and its variants - are useful, I just can't be bothered to make myself think that '{' actually means 'begin' !

(Dredges darkest depths of distant memory)

#define begin {
#define end }

20 years since I wrote any ‘C’, and I’m sure it shows!

 

[J-G]

20 years since I wrote any ‘C’, and I’m sure it shows!

I've never written any 'C' - and I’m sure it shows!

 

[AES]

And I have absolutely NO idea what you're all talking about. And I'm sure THAT shows too

 

[J-G]

We've obviously slipped into an area where you have never needed knowledge AES

You don't need to know how to program the machine you're flying, just how to respond to the results the computer gives you ✈

 

[selectortone]

I worked in sales of industrial control systems for 30 years until I retired 10 years ago. The PDP-11 was ubiquitous in process control back in the 1990s. For my job I had to have a basic (pun intended) knowledge of computer programming and studied Machine Code, Pascal and ladder logic (the language used to program industrial PLCs).

Nowadays very few programmers get down to the nitty-gritty of machine code where one is actually interacting directly with the registers of a CPU. From C onwards it's all about object-oriented programming- stringing modules of code together. I recently introduced my grandson to this with a Raspberry Pi and Python. What a difference to the old days. No longer any need to understand the architecture of a microprocessor. It's just a mysterious black box now.

It won't be long before AI takes over, the robots start designing themselves, and then we just have hope they don't start to wonder whether humans are really necessary any more.

 

[Sandyn]

So does that mean that perceived time passes faster for children now compared to when I was a child?

if there was any substance in my argument, the answer would be no, but it's just a fun idea I use. If the accelerating expanding universe did cause time to change, it would actually slow it down, but by a miniscule amount..... I think?

 

[Spectric]

the only facilities I had were to 'Seek' a Track Nº, then a 'Sector' Nº and read or write 128 bytes. This gave me a useful understanding of the very basic working of a Disc Drive.

That jogged some grey mater, cannot remember exactly when but there was a time when you had to setup your disc drives by providing all that sort of information, I believe it was either DOS or when Windows first came out and that ran under DOS.

I think what makes C so good for embedded systems is that it can work at a very low level, ie bit bashing and directly with the hardware without any frills, the trouble now is that some development platforms are deviating away from strict ANSI C which really impacts portability. C is not an object orientated language although you can write code in such a way as it partially emulates objects, ie using structures and you can directly work with a microcontrollers registers, they just have to be correctly mapped in a definition file.

20 years since I wrote any ‘C’, and I’m sure it shows!

I think you have a hybrid there, C ? and maybe visual basic !

C looks like

#include "P33EP512MU810.h"
#include "DMA.h"

void main()
{
unsigned int MyBuffer[12];
unsigned int *BP;

BP = &MyBuffer;

DMA0STAL = &MyBuffer;
}

and ladder logic (the language used to program industrial PLCs).

Now replaced by graphical programing especially when used in a SCADA based control system.

The one thing I really do not like is Android, what a load of fluff and nonsense.

As for AI and the idea of the IOT who knows what will happen, would you trust everything to some server based somewhere on the planet! Like anything that can make decisions AI will evolve and learn, it is just at what stage it decides to get interested in history and come up with the conclusion that humans are more trouble than they are worth, always starting wars and just not getting on with each other so it could well decide to get rid and make life easier for themselves.

 

[J-G]

That jogged some grey mater, cannot remember exactly when but there was a time when you had to setup your disc drives by providing all that sort of information, I believe it was either DOS or when Windows first came out and that ran under DOS.

If IRC it was under DOS and before Windows - but the people who wrote the BIOS were soon able to 'Read' that from the drive.

Pascal - in fact even BASIC - can manipulate 'bits' so that's not a reason to promote C.
Pre Windows, using Turbo Pascal, my PoS system wrote to and read from Video memory directly. I had 4 'screens' defined so I could prepare a screen in the background and swop them with a simple address asignment.

 

[JimJay]

So does that mean that perceived time passes faster for children now compared to when I was a child?

Nope - what your father told you still holds true: "Kids today don't even know they're alive!"

 

[Spectric]

It does seem strange thinking that once upon a time we did not have the windows OS, just DOS and microsoft did not seem to be a by word for software, but we did have some really good programs, who can remember Wordperfect and Quattro Pro!

 

[J-G]

who can remember Wordperfect and Quattro Pro!

Remember them? I still use them !! WordPerfect since V2 - now on V10 ( I don't write much!)

Vastly superior to any version of 'Word'. I also have customers (published authors) who wouldn't be without. One is still using 'Card Box' - admittedly the Windows version - as her main research database for all her projects.

 

[Spectric]

The one thing I remember about Wordperfect was that when importing images, when Word was just showing an outline box Wordperfect showed the actual image and with Quattro pro it could handle 16 bit binary numbers and the latest version of Word is still 9 bits, (511).

It shows the power of marketing and the lemming culture where popularity can propel the inferior product to market leader.

 

[J-G]

It shows the power of marketing and the lemming culture where popularity can propel the inferior product to market leader.

It's actually worse that that Roy. Micky$oft held back information regarding the inner workings of 'Windows' from all other developers for quite some time. In addition, WordPerfect insisted that their version for Windows should seamlessly read and use all documents previously created with their DOS Version. Micky$oft ignored all DOS documents - just as they did when they switched to .DOCX rather than .DOC. It was quite some time before they created the patch so that older versions of Word could read newer .docx documents.

These 'bully boy' tactics gave Word (or rather 'Office for Windows') a 6 month+ head-start. WordPerfect was further sidelined when it was sold to Novell (for a reported $190m) who did no developement work over 3+ years and eventually sold it to Corel for (again a 'reported') $85m !!

It then took Corel some time to update the ageing version. Body blows of this nature would surely have killed a lesser product but WP is so superior that it has survived.

I have one customer who was using 'LetterPerfect' - WordPerfect's little brother - to write a novel on a laptop with no hard drive - just a 720k floppy. She came to me because she couldn't save her latest [Edit]. It turned out that the file was now larger than half the disk size so there was insufficient space on the disk and she didn't know that she needed to use a new disc. As a result, (after solving her problem) I sold her a new 286 PC with a hard drive. She is now 93 and has been a customer for over 25 years.

 

[paulrbarnard]

I worked in sales of industrial control systems for 30 years until I retired 10 years ago. The PDP-11 was ubiquitous in process control back in the 1990s. For my job I had to have a basic (pun intended) knowledge of computer programming and studied Machine Code, Pascal and ladder logic (the language used to program industrial PLCs).

Nowadays very few programmers get down to the nitty-gritty of machine code where one is actually interacting directly with the registers of a CPU. From C onwards it's all about object-oriented programming- stringing modules of code together. I recently introduced my grandson to this with a Raspberry Pi and Python. What a difference to the old days. No longer any need to understand the architecture of a microprocessor. It's just a mysterious black box now.

It won't be long before AI takes over, the robots start designing themselves, and then we just have hope they don't start to wonder whether humans are really necessary any more.

I program in the AI space and optimise to machine code for real-time systems. It still happens…

 

[paulrbarnard]

It does seem strange thinking that once upon a time we did not have the windows OS, just DOS and microsoft did not seem to be a by word for software, but we did have some really good programs, who can remember Wordperfect and Quattro Pro!

There was a vibrant world before DOS. I actually wrote my first OS at the same time as Gates was working on DOS.
I loved WordPerfect. It is a massive shame it lost the war with Word.

 

[J-G]

I loved WordPerfect. It is a massive shame it lost the war with Word.

You can still get it - and you can [Save As] if you need to supply a modifyable file to the less aware who only know 'Word' - Printing to a .PDF is equally simple (though of course not easily editable).

The latest version (2021) is £320 which is a one time purchase - rather than the 'annual fee' that MS want for their Office 365 - but you can get older versions from on-line sources (I've seen V9 at £21).

I'm still using V6 - but I don't write Novels or Accademic papers!