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posted by
Fnord666
on Wednesday December 20 2017, @05:09AM
from the if-you-know-then-you're-old dept.
from the if-you-know-then-you're-old dept.
Many of you have heard about one of the oldest programming languages, COBOL, and you have also heard that COBOL programmers are much asked for nowadays to maintain old legacy code. There's another old-timer which few know about and which is still in use and will be in use for quite a while for applications in various specific fields (i.e. finance, banking, etc.). Its name is IBM RPG.
[...] RPG has been around for more than half a century. By the end of the 1950s, IBM had built a huge number of electromechanical devices called tabulating machines.
Let's talk about IBM RPG.
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A First Look at RPG: Turns Out It's Not Only Role-Playing Games
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< nobse> bleh... last night I had a dream... someone NMU'ed vim...
nightmare
-- in #debian-devel
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday December 20 2017, @04:06PM (3 children)
Oh, My, the Wang!
That brings back memories. Not the VS. But the PCS. 2200 if I remember. A single stand alone system in the enclosure of a "terminal". Ran a very nice dialect of BASIC. My high school got one of these for about $8000 in 1977. It has 8K RAM and BASIC with a printer. I learned everything about it. Spent hours after school on it. When I first tried a TRS-80 I was shocked at how primitive it's BASIC was. Wang BASIC was so advanced. Even Level II basic. Even the best BASIC packages on microcomputers were shockingly primitive. Later, after buying some Wang manuals with my own (after school earned) money, I learned that the Wang BASIC was 42.5 K of ROM! Whew! No wonder it was so amazing compared to even the biggest 12K BASIC on other popular microcomputers. Surprisingly it was basically impossible to find out things like which microprocessor it had, etc. Later, much much later, I learned why. The BASIC was microprogrammed onto a 4-bit slice microprocessor.
Surely, I'm not dating myself. Because I'm not narcissistic enough to do that.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday December 20 2017, @11:53PM (2 children)
Every Microsoft BASIC was crude and every non-Microsoft BASIC was better. My personal favorite in the 80s was BASIC09 on OS-9 on some kind of 6809 processor. Very nice. I had a lot of trouble downgrading from OS9 in the mid 80s until early linux in the early 90s, using PC stuff was quite a drastic step backwards after a couple years of OS-9. Only Radio Shack could market TRSDOS as a business computer and OS-9 as a game computer, totally got it backwards.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Thursday December 21 2017, @02:38PM (1 child)
Chuckle.
The computer revolution happened so fast that the business people of companies building computers had a hard time understanding let alone keeping up. By the time they would get a product to market, the next thing on the horizon to be shipping in one year already made the current product obsolete.
Osborne.
That's good to know.
What I mentioned about the Wang computer was in the mid late 1970's. When I was in school in the extremely late 70's to early 80's, the minicomputer had a much nicer BASIC than was on microcomputers. Both an "incremental compiler" and a "batch compiler". I had never heard of an "incremental compiler". It acted exactly like an interpreter. Type in lines. LIST. Type in replacement lines over a pre-existing line number. But when you ran it, it was within a hair's width of the speed of the batch compiler.
I had already spent lots of time dreaming about how to implement a very nice BASIC interpreter. Simply because I knew it was possible to out do Microsoft's BASIC. So now I had to dream about how this incremental compiler worked. My theory: When a line is typed in, that line is compiled into native code. In a table of line-numbers is stored a pointer to that compiled code. Any GOTO or other branch in the code would compile into a call (not subroutine, but jump) back to the "incremental compiler" passing the line number to branch to. That would be the part that accounts for the slight speed difference. The runtime would then look up the line and pass control to it's compiled code. This also provides the opportunity to TRACE or have breakpoints on line numbers, even in the incremental compiler. Once it all made sense in my head, I thought it was an amazing approach.
Once I was out of school, I started using Pascal immediately and never looked back at BASIC any more. Although I did built a BASIC interpreter using C++ in the mid 90's just out of fond memories. What struck me was how easy it was, compared to how difficult it would have been back in the 70's and early 80's to write an interpreter on then existing hardware.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Friday December 22 2017, @11:38PM
YES exactly. The "suits" thought they would continue the minicomputer licensing fees on $5 microprocessors the same way they billed for software for $15K minis. Typical example I was almost able to obtain a PDP-8 and asked a local DEC guy about obtaining software. Now OS-8 kicked butt compared to contemporary CP/M but DEC had this hilarious idea to bill something like $3500 so the local DEC guy was apologetic and willing to get me pirated PDP8 software but the deal fell thru etc. At minicomputer companies the engineering dept was usually pretty chill with the drop in price of hardware from tens of thousands of dollars to a hundred bucks but the finance side couldn't figure it out, so all those companies mostly died or morphed into something else.
It was a pity, a lot of minicomputer era software was pretty awesome. Imagine 80s home computers with OS-8 or maybe TOPS-10 instead of the junk they had. Using emulators its possible to play with that stuff today; OS-8 is a nice tiny OS and TOPS-10 is a cool medium size OS.