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From: je@bton.ac.uk (John English)
Subject: Re: Comparison of languages for CS1 and CS2
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Date: Fri, 30 Jun 1995 01:25:04 GMT
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George White (gwhite@piper.cs.colorado.edu) wrote:
: >>The Fortran compiler was quite literally awkward, consisting of
: >>several boxes of cards. You fed your source deck following the first
: >>pass of the compiler. It would punch out the object deck, which you
: >>would feed back into the card reader along with what I think was the
: >>linker/load/run time library. No disk or OS back then.
: >>
: >>Arra Avakian

: All these modern conveniences.....You've never really lived unless you 
: used punched paper tape with the 1620. We used to use both hole punchers
: (a small ice pick) and opaque sticky tape to do the minor debugging. It was
: a lot faster than loading the compilers again - they were on paper tape too.

I used to use an IBM 1130 at the University of Zambia in the early 70s.
One of the problems there was that in the rainy season the punched cards
would swell up with the increased humidity... every couple of hundred cards
one of them would shred itself spontaneously all over the inside of the
reader.  Ever cleaned out a card reader that's covered in the remains of
a card trying to inject itself at god knows what speed into a hole that's
half the required size?  Many a fun evening I spent with a toothbrush...
Anyway, let's get back on-topic, OK gang? :-)

-- 
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John English <je@brighton.ac.uk>, Dept. of Computing, University of Brighton
  "The Tory party is the cream of society: rich, thick, and full of clots"
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