🚀 go-pugleaf

patrick_dunford@hotmail.com.nz (Patrick Dunford) writes:
> I started High School 1979, PCs had only just been invented and at the
> end of that year they got their one and only TRS-80. By the 5th form
> we were submitting stuff on coding forms to the University of
> Canterbury's PDP-11 Pascal compiler which could also be programmed
> using punched cards and ran half a dozen 80x24 black & white terminals
> for editing.
>
> At University in 1984, the same setup was used, this time to run
> Fortran. It was gone by 1990 though.

Wierd.

In 7th form in 1980 we did punched card FORTRAN which the teacher ran
overnight on a local Whangarei bureau's Burroughs B1800 mini which had
a card reader, a line printer, two 5 MB (?) removeable disk packs, 48K
words RAM, a teletype console and a bank of toggle switches and cassette
drive to boot it from.  From time to time I would accompany the teacher
to do some live debugging on the console -- one fun thing to do was to
set the system date to just before midnight on various dates and see how
many of them would cause MCP to print different greeting messages when
midnight rolled over.

The same year (1980), a friend who'd gone direct to Waikato university
from 6th form was using Watfor FORTRAN on their PDP-11/34 with 256 KB RAM,
22 VT100 terminals, 2 LA120 dot matrix printers, and -- yes -- 2 x 5 MB
Winchester disks.  I remember going to visit him at one point during the
year and writing his assignment program for him :-)  The system had a
horrid setup whereby every time you compiled your program you would be
immediately logged off and your program listing (and results of execution,
if te compile was clean) would was automatically printed.  Those two
printers were kept flat-out the whole time!

By the next year, 1981, when I started at Waikato, the same 11/34 was
being used for Pascal instead, running a more conventional system except
that we still had only a line editor (EDT was on the system, but it
wasn't available to students) and the compiles were run in a batch queue.

At the same time, the university's main computer was a PDP 11/70 with
768 KB or core and dozens of mostly VT52 terminals, though I recall using
a Tectronix vector graphics storage terminal where you had to press
"clearscreen" each time you got to the bottom of the screen, otherwise
the new text would overwrite the old text!  *very* slow phosphor on that
one!

As a 2nd year student, in 1982, I had 24 hour access to the shiny new VAX
11/780 (2 MB RAM, I think) which was dog slow with 50 logins during the
day, but seemed very reasonably responsive with "only" half a dozen people
in the wee small hours.


I can't imagine a place going *back* from Pascal to FORTRAN in 1984!  Jeez.
I was doing things like playing with Turbo Pascal on a DEC Rainbow,
Modula II on the VAX, and machine code on a 128 K Mac that year!

-- Bruce

--
'We have no intention of shipping another bloated operating system and 
forcing that down the throats of our Windows customers'
  -- Paul Maritz, Microsoft Group Vice President