At uni, I was doing GeoChemistry. Despite having a chemical bent, we had to cover the other aspects of Geology as a matter of course.

Our paleontology professor had a theory about Permian fish, (Cephalaspids), which he was determined to prove were several species. This involved much measuring of specimens, statistics, scatter diagrams etc., which we laboriously produced by hand.

Chatting to a girl in the bar, (as you do), she suggested I visited the computer centre. Here a huge ICL 1904 mainframe sat eating punched cards and spitting out page after page of "music ruled, fan fold" printouts.

Very quickly, I discovered I could produce my own punched cards and the machine produced superb scatter diagrams. I was the star of the Geology school. I spent more and more time with the computer, and less and less with the fossils.

Got through uni, but went straight into DP at the end of the '70s. Fortran-66 mostly on an SEL computer. Continued into Fortran-77 in engineering/scientific applications on PDP and my favourites, VAX/VMS. Continued with VAXen and Fortran until '96. Since then, has been mostly C/C++/C# on Windows, although I still had Fortran applications.

The last year or so it has been mostly web stuff, a lot of Perl, PHP, MySQL that kind of stuff.

Yes, I remember when a program patch was done with scissors and sticky tape. Was more fun back then.

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Wave upon wave of demented avengers march cheerfully out of obscurity into the dream.

You folks bring back memories. Fortran, Cobol, yup. Still have the Kernighan & Ritchie C book. My first "Hello World" was on a *printing* terminal off of a Vax, running 300 baud....

Regards,

Ardis

That would be the one. With the operator precedence table on page 45. It was't until I read this quote from DMR himself that I finally understood the odd positioning of | & and ^. :)

http://www.quut.com/c/dmr-on-or.html

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You folks bring back memories. Fortran, Cobol, yup. Still have the Kernighan & Ritchie C book. My first "Hello World" was on a *printing* terminal off of a Vax, running 300 baud....

That would be the one. With the operator precedence table on page 45. It was't until I read this quote from DMR himself that I finally understood the odd positioning of | & and ^. :)

http://www.quut.com/c/dmr-on-or.html

Ha! Hadn't seen that before, thanks for the reference. I do seem to remember a few lunch table discussions on operator precedence. "Why did they do it *that* way? In [my favorite language]...." My table is on page 49, so I looked in the front to check the edition (11th printing) and found this:

This book was set in Times Roman and Courier 12 by the authors, using a Graphic Systems phototypesetter driven by a PDP-11/70 running under the UNIX operating system.

Phototypesetter? Pretty revolutionary at the time.

Regards,

Ardis

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How many can still program an IBM 402 or 407 control panel?

And operate and fix any of that 'heavy metal' stuff, from keypunches to the biggest unit record monsters?

"I want to be buried 9-edge face down"

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Proudly Banned from Predictator@Home and now Cosmology@home as well. Added SETI to the list today. Temporary ban only - so need to work harder :)



"You can't fix stupid" (Ron White)