The article also refers to an English Electric Leo computer, which was
the first commercial computer in the world.
I used to program the Leo's during the 1960's at Shell, in Melbourne.
The languages were Assembler and an interesting language called CLEO,
which was a bit like COBOL.
It was a multiprogramming machine (yes, way back then!). It could run 4
programs at once, I think.
It also had a most unusual instruction that allowed you to multiply
Pounds, Shillings and Pence by a number in ONE hardware instruction. If
you have any understanding of the British system of money at that time,
you'll marvel at that <smile>.
The Brits (and we Aussies) didn't have anywhere near the amount of money
that Americans had, and so we had to make really tight software to run
in really limited machines.
Mind you, the IBM 65 we got to replace the LEO's had PL/I which would
run in a 64K partition, and that was what Shell used for all commercial
work then. The old PL/I Optimiser compiler was/is a magnificent compiler.
Cheers,
Clem
Ed Finnell wrote:
_BBC News - Celebrating Colossus, the codebreaking computer_
(http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-17237494)
Some good links if you're so inclined.....
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