One-a-Day-Compiles: Good Enough For Government Work In 1983

theodp (442580) writes "Simon Allardice takes a stroll down coding memory lane, recalling that when he got started in programming in 1983, hand-writing one's programs with pencil on IBM coding sheets was still considered good enough for British government work (COBOL, Assembler forms). Allardice writes, 'And when you were finished handwriting a section of code — perhaps a full program, perhaps a subroutine — you'd gather these sheets together (carefully numbered in sequence, of course) and send them along to the folks in the data entry department. They'd type it in. And the next day you'd get a report to find out if it compiled or not. Let me say that again: the next day you could find out if your code compiled or not.' So, does anyone have 'fond' memories of computer programming in the punched card era? And for you young'uns, what do you suppose your C++ or Java development times would be like if you got one compile a day?" The other way you could program in 1983.

Comments

ah, those were the daze;-)

[airdrummer]

i started on punchcards in college on a cdc mainframe: drop the deck in the tray outside the machine room, operator periodically runs them, puts the output in the out tray, hours later...

i improved my turnaround by dating 1 of the operators;-)

/android $make

[pushing-robot]

Let me say that again: the next day you could find out if your code compiled or not.

So not much has changed, then.

Re:This article is stupid

[jones_supa]

You would lose your artistic vision in a blur of technical limitations.

These days we sometimes lose the artistic vision in blur of technical abundance.

Re:In the late 70s

[Arnold Reinhold]

The punched card era ended for me in 1975, when I started working on Data General Nova minicomputers at Computervision. But I spend more than a decade before that with cards and keypunch machines. I never let anyone else punch in my programs, as I usually found some errors when I typed them in myself. Card decks weren't dropped often and it wasn't that big a deal. Dropping a deck is not an effective way to shuffle it. I'm more nervous about my online source files being munged by accident. The overnight or 24 hour turnaround was common, but possible to work around. I spend many nights after mid-night at the MIT computer center in the late 1960s, when hour or even half hour turnarounds were possible. One spent the time waiting socializing or helping others find their bugs. During summer jobs at NASA MSC, I found a Honeywell 316 that wasn't being used much and could get time on it all to myself when needed. In the early 1970s my employer had an IBM 1130 and we took turns using it, so turnaround was not an issue there, though it could be when software was to be installed at a client. Finding ways to get around obstacles in your path was a valuable skill then as now.

Re:Huh?

[bzipitidoo]

In 1987, university budgets and aged professors made for an experience that was not much faster. PCs were a precious resource. Grad students got PC AT clones (286s) and undergrads sometimes got the use of an old PC XT clone.

But at least one old professor didn't believe in PCs, so for his classes students shared an IBM mainframe (a 3090 as I recall) with admin. We had green screen terminals, but results were printed and the printout placed in 1 of 100 pigeonholes, according to the last 2 digits of your SSN. Admin had 2 levels of priority on mere students. The system increased the priority of an unrun job every 3 hours, so between 8 AM and 5PM, it took 6 hours for us to get back the results of a job run. After hours, performance was on the whole much better, but could still vary. Might get a result in a few minutes, or might still have to wait an hour or more. Couldn't continue working after midnight. University budgets dictated that computer labs had to close for the night. Each dorm had 2 or 3 terminals available all night long, but there you couldn't get back any printouts. You didn't want any evening classes, as that cut into the best times to use the mainframe. Weekends were good, if you didn't mind giving up the best times for a little leisure.