On 23.07.18 10:28, Eric S Fraga wrote: > On Sunday, 22 Jul 2018 at 05:39, Tom Browder wrote: > > Sounds like there are a lot of fellow travelers here. If you lean > > more towards loving programming as I do (started in FORTRAN IV in > > 1961), you might check out the new world of Perl 6 (https://perl6.org) > > Interesting. I started way back when with FORTRAN 66 and APL but I have > moved on to Julia (julialang.org) these days.
In 1972 we were still submitting FORTRAN IV jobs on Hollerith punched cards, to run on an ICL1901 24-bit mainframe, which half-filled a room with its fridge-sized chain printer and big card reader and disk drives. But the electrical engineering department had its own little HP2100A 16-bit minicomputer, with 16k words of 980 ns ferrite core memory. (Very spiffy stuff, back then.) If you overwrote the punched tape bootloader in the first dozen words or so of RAM, then you had to load it by hand from the frontpanel switch register, word by word, in octal. The three-chip 8080A CPU had become the single-chip 8085 by the time I programmed it, before moving to the 8051 microcontroller, but sprinkling 13 of 'em in a system, 12 mask programmed, so no coding errors permitted, My first home CPU was a TMS9900, which like the COSMAC had 16 x 16 bit registers, but not on-chip. A pointer register set the location of the register workspace in RAM, so that on interrupt or subroutine call, changing one register gave a new set of registers instantly. It also had a barrel shifter, rotating a register any number of bits in a single instruction, optionally controlled by the 4 LSBs of R0. (Magic for computing sine and cos by the CORDIC method.) And it had 16x16 multiply and 32/16 divide. But the contemporary COSMAC was well ahead of its time - a CMOS CPU in 1976. Erik
