| My computer infancy | 2003-02-20 22:23 7 comments |
 by Flemming Funch This is the front panel of an HP 3000 Series II minicomputer. Not a good picture, but the best one I could locate. It was my first hands on entry into the world of computers. That was around 1975-76. I went to high school in Denmark where I grew up. "Holte Gymnasium" (the name of the school) wanted to be very progressive and top notch, so they had invested a considerable amount of money in this computer, which made it possible to introduce computer programming classes to students who wanted them. Most of the math & science types signed up, and a considerably smaller group stuck with it and became computer nuts. I was in the Fortran class. The other choice was Algol. There was a whole room set aside for the computer. The CPU itself was like a small refrigerator, and its harddisk was about the same size. 10MB I believe. The way you started the computer was that you punched in several binary words on one of the sets of 16 lighted switches on the front. That formed the binary instructions to read in the boot loader. The boot loader, the program that would actually start the operating system, was read on hole punch tape. You know, a paper streamer with holes across, each column representing one letter. The program is read in, and it figures out how to load the actual system from the harddisk. We didn't have any terminal with a screen the first year or so. What we used was teletype machines. Looks like an oldfashioned telex machine. A big electric typewriter. It could be used in online or offline mode. If you type commands to the operating system, it would answer by writing on paper. Or, you could sit and type in a program, which goes directly onto punch tape. And then you would go and insert the punch tape in the tape reader, type a command on the teletype to load it, and the computer reads it in. And you can then store it on the harddisk and run it. Typically what we would run would be little programs that printed out multiplication tables or square roots or something. Seemed like magic at the time, when the alternative was to use a slid erule or look the approximate answer up in a book. And later we got into little games, implementing known algorithms for solving little matchstick games and that kind of thing. But then there was also the Star Trek game. A lively action game where you're the Enterprise hunting Klingons. The graphics consisted a little 10x10 square of ASCII characters printed out on the printer after each turn, showing what is going on in the current sector. Kids today would probably not be able to fathom how anybody could use hundreds of hours on playing that, but it was rather addictive. One could reserve the computer in one-hour blocks after school. Every night the lights were on in that room way into the night, and it wasn't unheard of that somebody fell asleep there. There wasn't really more than a dozen or so people who really got into it, but they filled up the whole schedule. Myself and my buddy Morten filled up many slots. So did another aspiring programmer who went on to considerably greater heights with what he learned than I did. Anders Hejlsberg who was one grade below me, wrote what later on became the revolutionary Turbo Pascal compiler after he finished high school. And later on he was leading the projects that developed Borland Delphi, and Microsoft C#. I wonder what he learned on that teletype machine that I didn't learn. Maybe he went with the Algol class and spent less time playing Star Trek. Anyway, I just wanted to mention some ancient history, since many younger people today are born after that time, and have a hard time imagining a world before 3D graphics and Internet connections. And they probably wouldn't think of finding great joy in producing page after page filled with square roots. |