Mar-10-2017, 06:10 AM
I used it way back. Don't forget I started back in the 60's. There wasn't a lot to choose from, most
serious stuff was written in assembler BAL, Easycoder and such. Lisp was actually a pretty good language
considering it first emerged in 1958. The only other high level language that I can remember was fortran.
It too had it's peculiarities, what with starting letter indicating real or integer. I will never forget wiring an
entire program on a dozen plug in wiring boards.
You would run a deck of (punched) cards (I seem to recall 120 characters per card max) with one board
(program) plugged in, punch out a new deck, maybe sort the deck, and repeat the process for each board
in the entire process.
The output devices were actually quite advanced for the time. Amazingly fast line printers hammering out rows
of 132 characters from a spinning cylinder one row of a single character and filling in the others in one rotation.
In social circles, if you told people that you were an IBM (all computers were IBM's whether made by IBM or not),
they would walk away from you as soon as they could.
serious stuff was written in assembler BAL, Easycoder and such. Lisp was actually a pretty good language
considering it first emerged in 1958. The only other high level language that I can remember was fortran.
It too had it's peculiarities, what with starting letter indicating real or integer. I will never forget wiring an
entire program on a dozen plug in wiring boards.
You would run a deck of (punched) cards (I seem to recall 120 characters per card max) with one board
(program) plugged in, punch out a new deck, maybe sort the deck, and repeat the process for each board
in the entire process.
The output devices were actually quite advanced for the time. Amazingly fast line printers hammering out rows
of 132 characters from a spinning cylinder one row of a single character and filling in the others in one rotation.
In social circles, if you told people that you were an IBM (all computers were IBM's whether made by IBM or not),
they would walk away from you as soon as they could.