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The Quest To Find the Longest-Serving Programmer (tnmoc.org)
In 2014, the National Museum of Computing published a blog post in which it tried to find the person who has been programming the longest. At the time, it declared Bill Williams, a 70-year old to be one of the world's most durable programmers, who claimed to have started coding for a living in 1969 and was still doing so at the time of publication. The post has been updated several times over the years, and over the weekend, the TNMC updated it once again. The newest contender is Terry Froggatt of Hampshire, who writes: I can beat claim of your 71-year-old by a couple of years, (although I can't compete with the likes of David Hartley). I wrote my first program for the Elliott 903 in September 1966. Now at the age of 73 I am still writing programs for the Elliott 903! I've just written a 903 program to calculate the Fibonacci numbers. And I've written quite a lot of programs in the years in between, some for the 903 but also a good many in Ada.
Did anyone else read that as "Longest-SURVIVING"?
Don't Panic.
My first coding was for a North American Aviation RECOMP III back in 1973. I was, of course, a Junior High school student at the time.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Didn't know this was a contest. Wrote my first professional code in the summer of 1968 at Kitt Peak National Observatory on a CDC 3200, and wrote my last program yesterday on a Mac (both in Fortran). My first "program" of sorts was on an analog computer kit that I helped put together in my 6th grade class in 1962.
These folks were perfectly happy coding and you just alerted HR departments across the country to be on the lookout for old guys to get rid of.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
The Quest To Find the oldest properly commented code is still on-going. None were found so far.
"I refuse to join any club that will have me as a member." - Groucho Marx
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
... Wally, from the Dilbert Cartoon strip?
I started coding as a high school student in 1972 and still code today. A former co-worker in his 80s is still coding I believe - I know he started in the 1960s.
Well, I care about what sconeu said.
But I certainly don't care about what you said, especially as you are an AC and your comment contained no significant content.
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
It was used as an ATE(Automatic Test Equipment). Language Fortran II(with inline assembly capability). 16K 24-bit words. Paper Tape and punched cards. TTY. No disk or mag tape.
My father's been working for NASA since 1962 - I think his job then was on analog computers. His group did the flight certification of the Saturn V LVDC, and digital computers of the day couldn't keep up with hardware-in-the-loop simulation. They also simulated TLI after they reached orbit to make sure they would go to the Moon.
He's still there, working on the SLS guidance simulation these days.
I remember getting a Geniac "computer" for my birthday back around 1960 and figuring out the logic for different ideas and implementing them by putting these little brass contacts into the 3 pegboard wheels which you could turn by hand to set the states and make little light bulbs light up for output. I would have been around 8 years old then and it was just for fun and learning. At that time programming often consisted of jumpers on patch boards - around 1980 I was surprised when a medical equipment company I worked for doing R&D tossed out boxes of those patchboards with their programming jumpers still in place; when I asked they said that they were finally updating their computer and the new computer couldn't read the old patchboards! My dad worked at Western Electric and took me down a couple of times around 1960 and I remember playing tac-tac-toe on a computer they had there. Later, around 1968, a friend of mine had graduated from high school and went to college and we both spent time writing and punching decks of cards for Fortran programs which ran on the schools IBM 1130. I remember having to pre-process the decks because the machine only had something like 4K of memory and everything had to stripped and compressed to run. In college, around 1970, I remember submitting card decks with programs I had written at a window and coming back the next day to pick up a printout of my syntax errors. I didn't write anything professionally until later in the 1970 when the 8008 came out and I started doing assembly language work (actually doing the assembly work by hand and writing out and entering the hex opcodes, sometimes in binary on switches, usually for hardware drivers). I get some nostalgic feelings for those times but I wouldn't want to do it again!
If any of them are still alive. They worked at Bletchley Park during WWII, programming Colossus to decode Nazi Enigma messages. I'm assuming we're talking about programming electronic computers, since anyone who used a slide rule in their youth would've programmed a mechanical computer.
He was the one who showed me Quake 3 on a raspberry PI.
Larry B from Oak Ridge TN, works at Siemens now.
He's still writing good code, last I heard. :)
Truth isn't Truth - Guliani
First program: SOAP II assembly language, IBM 650 as a graduate assistant at Syracuse University. Latest (yesterday) PHP/MySQL database manipulation with HTML/Javascript/CSS handling the interactivity using AJAX.
In between - IBM 7070, 1401, 7040, System/360. CDC 6400/6600/7600/Cyber 205, Cray X=MP, Y-MP, and all manor of killer micros.
What a ride!!
I might as well chime in here since I seem to be part of this group.
I started programming in university in 1966 (IBM 7090 mainframes and DEC Linc-8) and have been coding fairly continuously since including starting several software based companies. I'm retired now but still coding (health data collection and analysis).
Some early computers I have programmed (as far as I can remember):
IBM 7090, 360, 1620
DEC Linc-8
Systron-Donner (analog)
Intel 8008
Osborne
Cosmacelf 1605
Commodore PET
Apple II, III, Mac
Radio Shack TRS-80
MS-DOS based computers
Novel Netware (3.14 forever...)
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
My first computer was more-or-less a toy for learning logic circuits and I'm pretty sure I got it in the late 60's or very early 70's?
I can't remember what it was called and I can't find it on google either (probably because I can't remember what it was called). You could make programs of a sort by drawing on a piece of paper and then cutting the paper out to put into a sort of a hood that was on top of this little machine and plugging some wires into holes in the casing, then somehow (I can't remember exactly how) you moved some red switches up and down at the bottom of the "computer".
Does anyone else remember that thing? It might have been from Radio Shack? I remember that the sliding switches were red and the case was beige and maybe that top hood was amber or red as well?
If you're a zombie and you know it, bite your friend!
Outside of a museum, are there any Elliot 903s actually in service that Mr.Froggatt is writing code for??
I understand why there might be some old IBM 370 machines still kicking around, but not an Elliot 903.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
My Dad is a retired Civil Engineer. He hasn't programmed in decades, he has some great stories about programming engineering hydrology simulations in Fortran in the early 60s.
My favorite story is he did the first simulation of Sao Paulo's waste-water treatment and runoff system. They called him in a panic 10 minutes after they ran it because it was "stuck"... he told them to wait for 30 minutes (since it took that long to churn through the initial matrix iteration). It worked and they were happy. He did it on an IBM 360.
My Dad ended up moving away from programming because the partner of the firm he was at told him to run away or else he would be branded "the computer guy". Even then tech types were second-class citizens.
He started working with computers in 1965. Still doing OS development with the XBOX team. I'll hopefully have his longevity but I know I won't have the impact his career has had.
I think this is what you're talking about: https://www.pcworld.com/articl...
I had one myself around the same time. The "red switches" were actually a slider that moved a number of contacts up and down. Depending on how you wired the contacts, they would act is AND, OR, XOR gates and you could put together simple logic functions like decoders, half adders, etc. The output was a number of light bulbs.
Is was as finicky as all hell and not all that well documented. I suspect the poor documentation was due to the fact there wasn't a lot of education depth in the tool - once you figured out how to wire the different gates, that was really all there was to it.
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
Started in 1969 at age 16, using SEL-840MP (FORTRAN and assembly), PDP-5 (machine code and BASIC), and Tymshare (CAL). Still employed as a developer today, using Scala, Python, and JavaScript. Just finished my Deep Learning specialization on Coursera with Andrew Ng.
Not on any prescription medications yet. I think I can take this in a few years.
I wrote my first program for a Olivetti calculator in 1968. Then taught myself FORTRAN using a teletype with a punch tape storage in 1971. By 1972 I was taking upper level classes at University of Omaha (now University of Nebraska at Omaha). Today I am programming machine learning and using WebAssembly. And still have no money.
Maybe we can get one of those Grey Beards out there to program COBOL to do an age check program ;)
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
The first was a Fortean program to calculate the sine of an angle using a series expansion. I never could get it to work. The latest was an iPhone app to convert a 2D video into a 3D video viewable with google glasses (not submitted yet).
Starting in the 60's was harder, and is an actuarial question now. By the time of the early 70's, the PDP-8/e was on desktops and probably somewhat common. So was dial-up or even direct-connected terminals. (Both were available in high schools in central PA, which was NOT a high-tech area).
This https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... was "on desktops"
I don't think so.
Perhaps you are thinking of the PDP-8, which was still not a desktop compter, but the CPU (taken out of the rack) could fit on top of a desk. http://images.computerhistory.... You'll still need peripheral devices (paper tape, maybe a disk drive) and of course a user interface (typically an ASR-33 http://physicsmuseum.uq.edu.au...).
By the mid 1970s our school district had HP 2000 (that is HP 2100 series) minicomputers for timesharing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_Time-Shared_BASIC) and they were similar (in size and everything else) to the PDP-11 pictured above. http://www.decodesystems.com/h...
We had ASR-33s, ADM-3A CRTs. then later HP 2640 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... "smart" CRT terminals.
When these HP 2000 TSB systems first came in, our school district, the richest one in the USA, was the only one outside of Cupertino (home of HP) to have this. These were very popular and by the late 70s there were a number of school districts in the country with similar setups.
A sightly smaller system of the era you're talking about would be the HP 1000 series, but it is still not a "desktop" computer! http://www.memoires-informatiq...
The first desktop computer I saw was when I started programming in 1972: the Datapoint 2200 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.... But I only used it as a smart terminal to submit virtual punch-card decks to the IBM/370. Well, and playing 3-D Tic-Tac-Toe (graphics!) on it, but no development environment was available to us.
The first real desktop computer I saw (and used) in those days was a few years later, in 1975, and it cost $20,000. That was the IBM 5100 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.... I did APL programming on it (although mostly we worked on the mainframes, which were IBM/370 and Amdahl/470s).
The early-mid 1970s was the era of microcomputer kits (8080, Z80, 6502, 6800, etc.) and those would fit in a box on a desk. Typically with a television set on top. Keyboard separate, and probably some more boxes for periperhals (cassette tape player, floppy drives) etc. The Apple and TRS-80 complete computers all came much later.
As for tiny PDP-11 type systems...
The Heathkit H-11 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... was a PDP-11 dekstop computer available in 1978 but was soon discontinued because it was too expensive for anyone to buy. (No market at that price point.) I also recall an advertisement in BYTE around 1979 for some kit that also used the LSI-11 and I am sure could fit on a tabletop by then. It might even be much slimmer than an Altair/OSI kind of box.
Of course the most beautiful desktop computer from the late 1970s was the Sol 20 http://oldcomputers.net/sol-20... . A friend of mine had one of those.
I've been programming since 1972. In the 1970s I was programming on IBM mainframes, Honeywell 6000 mainframes, HP 2000 minicomputers, PDP-10 mini-mainframes, a little microcomputer work. (A few years later I would be light years ahead, developing Lisp Machine wo
But I might be one of the older programmers still active. I learned my first programming language in the Army in 1961, for a Sylvania Mobidic computer, which I never got a chance to write. But I did write code and wired plug boards for the Univac File Computer while stationed at Governor's Island in New York City. Won't bore you with all the computers I wrote for, but here are some highlights: I have worked in a wide number of software genres, ranging from compilers/interpreters, multi-user operating systems for the PDP8, a Microdata machine, and on top of IBM 360 DOS. Have been writing a lot of hypertext (something I call farView), which I started in the '80s for the PC and DEC.I wrote one of the (only?) music synthesis software programs for the Z80. Sold a couple of copies. But now I am currently employed writing and maintaining software for web front and back ends. Also playing with Unity and A-Frame for fun. I'm 77.
If the greybeards wrote the code for slashdot, it would support unicode.
My grandfther, had he not died abouty 5 years ago, might well have come close to these. His first pieces of software where in the late 1960s whilst he was working as a research chemist at the CSIRO. He continued writing software throught his career, particularly writing it for the mainframes used at the BP refinery he worked at , for IBM and VAX mainframes. By the time he passed away 5 years ago, he was still coding bits and pieces on his trusty old PC
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
http://www.immediatec.net/
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
After reading these comments, I suddenly feel young again, having been programming for "only" 33 years professionally.
I started in 1977.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I've been programming since 1966 (grade 9 student). PNPOLY, a little program that I wrote in 1970, is still used. I get a couple of emails a year about it. It tests whether a point is in a polygon. Translated from Fortran II to C, it's 8 lines of executable code. The documentation is about 10x longer, but people still get it wrong.
https://wrf.ecse.rpi.edu//Rese...
Now I'm inventing very fast parallel geometry algorithms, teaching computer engineering, and just graduated my 18th PhD student. My code is generally freely available for nonprofit research and education, see https://wrf.ecse.rpi.edu/nikol...
HW I have used (at least a little):
DEC PDP 1, 8, 10, 11, Vax 11/780; IBM 1620, 7094, 360, 370, 5100; Prime; Lisp Machine; Motorola 6811, 68000, 68010, 68020; Sequent Balance; CM-2; Intel 8051, 8086, Pentium, Xeon; Sun Sparc; AMD Opteron.
Wordlengths: 8, 12, 16, 32, 36 (containing 5 7-bit chars plus 1 spare bit)
Wrote autocoder for the IBM 7070 at Brown University in September 1965. Wrote a little PHP today. In between: IBM/360 Assembler, FORTRAN, PL/I, PL/S, BASIC, Bruin, Pascal, Modula-2, COBOL, Forth, Snobol, Jovial, CMS-2, HAL/S, Javascript, AN/UYK-20 assembler, and the best by far of all of them: Ada.
Looks like I am joint leading with Bob Munck here.
As part of the engineering course at Cambridge, we each had to write a small excercise program in Autocode for the Titan computer there. I can't remember what it was for, something like find the largest in a list of numbers. We never saw the computer, and only wrote on coding sheets and got the answer back (or a failure message) three days later on LP paper. Since then I have programmed a lot, including for an analog computer and a Cray, but for engineering projects and not as as a full time programmer; and also as a hobby. I'm currently programming an Arduino in C.
Mod up +10
Yes, greybeard here. The systems analysts asked the users what they wanted, then wrote a spec that delivered it, and the programmers implemented it. There was none of this Agile "release early, release often" crap back in the day ... you released when it was ready, and not until. And another thing: there was none of the modern trend of "Sorry, the computer's down" in the middle of the day - that was simply not allowed (sacking offence if it did) ... you took the system down for hardware maintenance (on-site engineers ...) and/or system software upgrades *out of hours*. Of course there were hardware failures, but the systems were resilient and *failed over* without service interruption. Yes these were the kind of machines that cost squillions, spinning tapes behind slidey perspex panels, as much as a gigabyte of disc per row of wardrobes, occupying entire rooms per computer.
Anyone seen my lawn ?
If you don't pray in my school, I won't think in your church.
That would be a good thing to know. Doing actual work. That earns actual money. A product, or line of products that sells. Over generations of technology. From back when computers could be expanded up to 48K + ROM and some memory mapped IO; to today's computers.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
Started programming in 1969 in Fortran, progressed through a number of assembly languages (including MetaSymbol on XDS machines, what a joy!), basic, enough cobol to know I'd never touch it again, snobol, Pascal (as many strengths as weaknesses in the language, probably a mistake to protect the programmer from himself), Revelation, a bit of perl, a bit of forth (yuck, a solution in search of a problem), icon, a bit of java, awk, cubic metric tons of shell scripting, C, probably some others along the way. Retired and still doing some C for my own uses. Over 48.5 years, C is my all-time favorite language by far.
Circle the wagons and fire inward. Entropy increases without bounds.
I am only 63 years old, I started programming in 1969 while in high school, but did not do it professionally until 1977 after working as a computer operator for 4 years. I learned and wrote Basic and Fortran on a TTY device connected to a DEC PDP-10 located at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine. Also, at my high school we had an Olivetti Underwood Programma 101 desktop computer that we used in geometry and calculus classes to solve problems and calculate limits. I maintain a heterogeneous LAN at home consisting of Linux and Windows computers -- I've never had less than 4 computer networked at home since the mid to late 1990s when the 7 PCs I was running 24/7 were processing work packets from the SETI program while I was working in South America. These days, I am mostly writing in c, shell script, python, and maintaining two websites.
Then again, I remember working 60 hours straight as well. Prepping for a major deployment during regular work hours, spending all night trying to deploy it, then at the last possible moment, rolling it all back again. Spending the next day debugging what went wrong, fixing it, prepping for another deployment attempt, spending all night re-deploying it, and then spending the following day monitoring the system and ensuring there were no issues and finally going home exhausted. I doubt I could still pull that off today.