Memories of College Computer Classes

[CarlD]

There was nothing like watching some grad student come in with all his data in six long card boxes (had to be 32" long)--and drop them!

By 1980 they should have bought a tape for $30 and loaded the data onto the tape--it took about 4 or 5 JCL cards to do that. After that, the cards in the program would be a handful at most. They were pretty good for propping up short legs on tables, though!

By then TSO was available for many, many and cards were anachronistic. In 1982, at UNC-CH, they introduced WYLBUR as a cheaper alternative to TSO. You could do some pretty cool interactive programming in WYLBUR, and later at CPI in DC they had SuperWylbur. Other dialects were WylburPlus--and all were programmable for interactive editing and job submission.

[waterbear]

FORTRAN IV drove me crazy with the GOTOs you had to use. But I could write in it.

.

The GOTOs gave me a lot of practice for my stint as an assembly language programmer!

Had to love the power of the DO statement, though!

[waterbear]

There was nothing like watching some grad student come in with all his data in six long card boxes (had to be 32" long)--and drop them!

Did that with my final project in my advanced FORTRAN class! Only 2 boxes though!

[waterbear]

Left programming for the lower echelons of project management in the early 1990s and have been proudly unproductive ever since.

I Left it when C++ became the flavor of the week. Never could get the hang of OO topdown programming. Where are the subroutines? What do you mean I have to explicitly define all my variable and arrays at the start? I don't know what I will need until I start coding!
IMHO, this is when bloatware began!

[polyvue]

I Left it when C++ became the flavor of the week. Never could get the hang of OO topdown programming. Where are the subroutines? What do you mean I have to explicitly define all my variable and arrays at the start? I don't know what I will need until I start coding!
IMHO, this is when bloatware began!

I still don't get Java/C++ and all that oop stuff. Younger folks who take to this concept (having been taught it at university) can code in it but hate debugging it. Not surprising, as there's no detectable linear flow. "We don't need no stinkin' logic..." Just look under every rock (object) and rely on automated trace tools. Well, different paradigm. Funny thing is, where I work, COBOL / IDMS programmers hired as consultants make MORE money than the endless supply of .NET / SAS / SQL / Java coders that come out of the schools. It's totally flipped from 10 years ago. Procedural programmers are a dying breed but companies /gov'ts still have plenty of COBOL code running under some flavor of z/OS.

Weirdest programming langauge environment I ever dealt with: DACL. It was a proprietary language Xerox cooked up for its mini computers in the 1970s. Some strange mix of assembler and BASIC. Pure spaghetti.