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Mature Mainframe Prints Mandlebrot Fractal in 12 Minutes

posted by LaminatorX on Thursday March 26 2015, @09:14PM   Printer-friendly
from the plots-of-plots-of-plots dept.

mendax writes:

Here is a story for the computer history buffs. El Reg is reporting that Ken Shirriff, a programmer better known for work on Arduino, got access to a 50-year-old IBM 1401 mainframe in the collection of the Computer History Museum and programmed it to produce a Mandelbrot fractal, printing it out on a line printer. Even though the computer has a Fortran compiler, he wrote the program in assembly language.

While this is not exactly an amazing feat of software engineering in anyone's book, it is an object lesson in how difficult (and how fun) it was to program the ancient mainframes of our fathers' and grandfathers' times.

Mr. Shirriff's story and lots of pictures can be found on his blog.

 
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  • (Score: 1, Redundant) by LoRdTAW on Thursday March 26 2015, @10:11PM

    by LoRdTAW (3755) on Thursday March 26 2015, @10:11PM (#162987) Journal

    What the immature mainframe printed out.

    Penises of course.

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  • (Score: 2, Funny) by hemocyanin on Thursday March 26 2015, @10:28PM

    by hemocyanin (186) on Thursday March 26 2015, @10:28PM (#162992) Journal

    Don't be coarse.

    It was boobies.

  • (Score: 5, Informative) by kaszz on Friday March 27 2015, @12:16AM

    by kaszz (4211) on Friday March 27 2015, @12:16AM (#163030) Journal

    ASCII Pr0n .. ;)

    http://www.asciipr0n.com/pr0n/pinups/pinup36.txt [asciipr0n.com]

    • (Score: 3, Informative) by TGV on Friday March 27 2015, @06:41AM

      by TGV (2838) on Friday March 27 2015, @06:41AM (#163118)

      In case all ya kids think that is a joke: it isn't. When I was small, I visited the computer center of the bank where my father worked. They had a brand new IBM 370 and for a few kids, they printed out Snoopy pictures like these: http://www.asciiworld.com/-Snoopy,512-.html. [asciiworld.com] I put one on the wall of my bedroom. Later, I discovered there were all kinds of EBCDIC art files. So the above link is indeed what the immature mainframe would print.

      • (Score: 2) by mendax on Friday March 27 2015, @06:44AM

        by mendax (2840) on Friday March 27 2015, @06:44AM (#163120)

        I've seen similar things. As a kid, it was quite a badge of honor to have one of those. They used to print those things out at the university I eventually ended up going to during their open house when I was a kid. However, they sold them and my dad was too cheap to buy one for me. Just another resentment against my parents to overcome.

        --
        It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.

      • (Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Saturday March 28 2015, @12:54AM

        by hemocyanin (186) on Saturday March 28 2015, @12:54AM (#163373) Journal

        fyi - link is broken

      • (Score: 2) by TGV on Saturday March 28 2015, @07:34AM

        by TGV (2838) on Saturday March 28 2015, @07:34AM (#163469)

        That's because the period at the end of the phrase is being added to the URL. That hasn't happened to me on a forum since 1999, I think. Well, here it is again: http://www.asciiworld.com/-Snoopy,512-.html [asciiworld.com]