🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <5d3988b0-f0ee-475e-9e30-5071a087d39b@v26g2000prm.googlegroups.com>, "R.Nicholson" <rhnlogic@yahoo.com> wrote:
>The article says that at 4 a.m. on May 1st, 1964, Kemeny and Kurtz ran
>their first BASIC program on Dartmouth college's General Electric
>GE-225 mainframe.

Interesting, before I read this I would have been happy to say the 
language I was briefly introduced to on a GE-225 at UQ was BASIC.

But that was in 1963!  So, does anyone out there recall what *was* the 
actual "user language" on that beast in those days?  Attempting to 
dredge the dark recesses of 45-year-old memory I find flutterings of 
an answer... but nothing definite.

Clearly, I didn't get sufficiently involved then to actually write a 
program. :)  AFAICR the early lectures all involved matrix algebra 
(which I'd never studied as such) and went so far over my head that I 
decided I had better things to do with my time.

I guess they were leading into a discussion of data arrays and such, 
but they way they presented it was incomprehensible to me.  Buggered 
if I know why they felt the need to do it that way -- arrays as such 
are perfectly simple concepts.  Perhaps lecturers don't get paid if 
they make things too easy. ;-)

>(Thankfully, they continued program language development beyond
>their Dartmouth Oversimplified Programming Experiment , or this
>group [c.l.b.m] might have had the much less desirable name: comp.lang.DOPE  :)

Addendum:  I had a quick Google for "GE-225 University Queensland" and 
turned up quite a bit of stuff, including this page:
<http://www.computer.museum.uq.edu.au/documents.html>
which contains a *long* list of ancient manuals (both hardware and 
software) for GE, DEC (PDP-8 and PDP-10), VT55, VAX/VMS and other bits 
and pieces, all in PDF format! [But most are bloody big files!]

Readers of comp.lang.basic.misc [c.l.b.m] may be interested in these:

GIGI BASIC Manual [30 MB] <http://www.computer.museum.uq.edu.
au/pdf/AA-K335A-TK%20GIGI%20BASIC%20Manual.pdf>

DECsystem10 Basic Language Reference Card (Version 17B) [9 MB]
<http://www.computer.museum.uq.edu.
au/pdf/DEC-10-XBRCA-A-D%20DECsystem10%20Basic%20Language%20Reference%2
0Card%20(Version%2017B).pdf>

Cheers, Phred.

-- 
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