> On Wed, 2010-12-29 at 11:34 -0800, Harold Hallikainen wrote:
>> >
>> > I spend most Saturdays at The National Museum of Computing
>> > at Bletchley Park  http://www.tnmoc.org/
>> >
>> > I look after a 1960's British computer called an "Elliott 803B", and
>> > I have to tell you that programmers today have a really easy job
>> > compared to the people that programmed the machines from that era !
>> >
>> > PeterO
>>
>> Was that made by Elliott Automation?
>
> Yes (ish) :-)
> At the time the 803 was made I think it was still Elliott Brothers, but
> it is the same company.  Elliott Automation was the group or parent
> company I think.
>
> PeterO


Great! I see lots of references to Elliott Brothers and Elliott Automation
in my archives. As I mentioned, I remember seeing one of the Elliott
computers (3 or 4 foot rack cabinet) in my father's company conference
room. I never did anything with it, though. I think Elliott sold or
manufactured my father's equipment in Europe, but I don't think they sold
the Elliott equipment in the US.

Back on the subject... I did some Fortran punched card stuff in school. A
little while later, I did assembly language programming on the PDP-8. This
was a punched tape system. We used the front panel toggle switches to key
in a loader program. When we ran that, we loaded another loader from
punched tape. Once that was in core, we could load an editor or an
assembler. The editor was a bit like the line editor that shipped with
DOS. The output went to punched tape. When the assembler was loaded, you'd
start it, then run the source tape through twice. This would produce an
object tape. You'd then load the object tape and try running your program.
Debug consisted of single stepping while watching front panel LEDs showing
the program counter and the accumulator. It was a pain, but it worked. You
could really see how stuff was brought up "by its bootstraps." Each new
program added features that could be used to build new programs.

As to the difficulty, I think the difficulty has remained constant. We now
have more powerful tools (and library code), but we are trying to solve
more difficult problems.

Harold

--=20
FCC Rules Updated Daily at http://www.hallikainen.com - Advertising
opportunities available!
--=20
http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive
View/change your membership options at
http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist
.