in reply to I started with...:

I started in 1977 programming FORTRAN on an ICL 1900 mainframe running GEORGE III, a brilliant o/s. Without exception everyone I have spoken to who used it says it is the best o/s they ever worked with. The mainframe was 250 miles from the office and we had a teletype and a 100 baud acoustic coupler, sort of like a modem but you dialed the computer with a normal phone and then put the handset into rubber cups on the coupler once the connection was made and it listened to and translated the funny noises.

The mainframe had 128k words of memory and a word was four 6-bit "bytes" so there were no lower-case letters in the character set. Also, the numbers 0 to 9 were represented by 000000 to 001001 so their character was the same as their value. This caused me no end of confusion when I moved to ASCII machines.

Cheers,

JohnGG

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Re^2: I started with...:
by Gavin (Archbishop) on Apr 28, 2006 at 19:28 UTC
    You'll be telling us next you used an abacus before that!
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      No, a slide rule and log tables. Oh, and one of those Sinclair calculators where you had to use reverse Polish. I don't go back as far as some of the memories in this thread. What a fantastic trip down memory lane.
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        A mere ten years ago I bought an HP-48GX graphing calculator with, yes, Reverse Polish notation as the default entry mode. It appears that this is still produced.
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        Did you have anti logs or like me did they only let you have logs and you had to work backwards. I showing my age now! However I'm really a newbie as for as computers are concerned my first computer was a 386 in 2000 so I don't have any early memories, but it is very interesting reading about others beginnings.
[reply]

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