Data from Columbia 2/1/03 massacre survived... Sounds like anothergovmint covup to me!

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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In sci.space.history Fred J. McCall wrote:
Rick Jones wrote:

:It was in the IBM "PC-RT" which those enough "fortunate" to be at
:CMU ca 1984-1988 could use as an "Andrew" workstation.

No, that was a different processor. I think that one was the
RS/6000.

My dimm memory isn't what it used to be. Perhaps we were both
wrong/right?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_6150_RT

rick jones
--
firebug n, the idiot who tosses a lit cigarette out his car window
these opinions are mine, all mine; HP might not want them anyway...
feel free to post, OR email to rick.jones2 in hp.com but NOT BOTH...

On Tue, 27 May 2008 17:57:12 +0000 (UTC), Rick Jones
wrote:

My dimm memory isn't what it used to be. Perhaps we were both
wrong/right?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_6150_RT

"The IBM RT had a varied life even from its initial announcement. Most
industry watchers considered the RT as "not enough power, too high a
price, and too late". Many thought that the RT was part of IBM's
Personal Computer line of computers. This confusion started with its
initial name, "IBM RT PC"."

....Of course, it didn't help that quite a few of their corporate sales
geeks were pushing the RT as if it were a PC, albeit one intended for
the higher-end academics, science labs, and even as a server-client
base pair for CAT labs. They tried to pawn those off on Texas U back
when the Micro Channel Architecture scam first got off the ground,
with some 32-station testing lab involving the 6152s and one 6150. The
Comp Center eval'd the network, found that a PC XT "server" and 32 "B"
models as "clients" ran rings around it, and that wound up being one
of the major decisions in the beancounters issuing memos to the
various schools of whatever to go with (cr)Apple and the Macs.

Want another example of how down-upon the RT was looked? The Aerospace
Engineering school sent out an intercampus memo offering to trade
*three* RTs for just -one- Trash-80 Model 12...

OM
--
]=====================================[
] OMBlog - http://www.io.com/~o_m/omworld [
] Let's face it: Sometimes you *need* [
] an obnoxious opinion in your day! [
]=====================================[