On Mon, 26 May 2008 19:10:14 -0400, Kevin Willoughby
wrote:

There is something ironic about the fact that the two most notable RISC
machines were both the smallest, slowest, cheapest computer (PDP-5/8) of
its era, and the biggest, baddest, fastest computer of its era (CDC).

Even better: these two machines were the first two computers I ever
programmed.

....I personally never worked on any of the PDP series, but I had at
least one Texas U "Cyber" account on the 6600 from the fall of 1976 to
the summer of 1987 - almost 11 years! And most of that was programming
in MNF4, although one semester I got suckered into testing out a
version they called "Fortran 5" that tried to turn Foutran into a
Pascal knockoff, with some elements of top-down design shoehorned in
to frack things up. It was essentially a "hack/cludge" attempt to port
Data General's "Fortran 5" from a Nova to the 6600 that some bright
kid in the Comp Center administration thought would be "easier" to use
while at the same time cutting usage costs for student accounts due to
the compiler being somewhat more optimized than Fortran IV was.

....And that should have been the tip-off that we were fracked. The
first two programs assigned couldn't be completed because we'd
uncovered bugs in the compiler that were so fatal that they actually
defeated some of the safeguards that Texas U added to the 6600 to
prevent massive runtime infinite loops that would eat up an account's
allocated funds in seconds. The first five weeks of the class
consisted in the end of nothing but talking about the language while
we waited for the bugs to be fixed. In the end of the 13 programs we
expected to be assigned - one a week - only 8 were actually assigned,
and the compiler bugs at the end of the semester were so bad that the
prof decided to not include the last two programs in the grading -
only three of the 45 people in the class managed to get theirs to
compile and produce results before the compiler would go tits up!

....At the end of the semester we were asked to evaluate the language's
ease of use, as well as how well the 6600 handled the compiling and
run ops. In both cases the entire class was unanimous - take the
master tapes containing the language and after they'd bulk erased
them, throw them on a pyre as a sacrifice to the gods of programming
in hopes they'd forgive humanity for having created such an atrocity.

OM
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