Then and now

One got used to keeping track of decimal places in one's head, a skill I quickly lost when switching to a calculator. Even though I do such calculations every day, I can't even do the simple estimates anymore. A calculator is just too handy of a crutch to retain that skill.

It's not so much interpolation as estimation and that's only needed to read the final result (or add ;-).

I've actually come across the darn things in thrift stores for a few dollars. I'll have to drop by the Salvation Army Thrift Store every now and then to see If I can find one. :-)

TDD

Heck, slide rules got us to the Moon. :-)

TDD

Hey, I had that!

There was some key combination that would turn it into a timer. Not sure why, but we thought that was a big deal.

Jeff

It's amazing that you can buy something for ten

If you can find an HP-45 with a working power switch, I'll take it! I have a supply of batteries. I few years ago I found a battery replacement kit that adapts standard AA batteries. ;-)

Can anyone under the age of 30 do simple division?

The typical PDA/smartphone today has more raw processing power and memory than an early IBM Mainframe like the system 36? the University of waterloo computing center was built to house

It was the '74 Sport, When I stop to think of it. I did put electronic ignition on the '69 later on.

The '74 Dart was the only Chrysler I owned, and the slant six as trouble-free as the Chevy 2.8 and 3.1's I've settled on lately. Trans was good too. Car was dog slow though. Never had all those ignition problems you guys are talking about, and it went to the bone yard with the same starter it came with. But the back end rusted like crazy. Had to go when I was afraid the rear leaf spring mounts would let loose. You didn't have to crawl underneath to see them either. Just open the trunk and look. Trunk floor had dissolved.

--Vic

I'm sure you mean S/360. System-36 was a minicomputer out of Rochester MN, from the '80s, predecessor of the AS/400.

In 1965-66 I learned about digital computers at the university where they had a Univac 1100 series being replaced by the IBM 360/50 RAX system during that time period. It was heaven for me playing with those monsters. :-)

TDD

It was '67-'68 for me (junior/senior years in high school). Our school board refused the university's offer of PLATO terminals ("if the students have computers in the math classes they won't learn math") so the university offered free classes, books, and computer time for any high school student who wanted to learn programming. At the time, Computer Science was in the graduate college. They want to find out if high school students could learn how to program (seems silly now). Anyway, we used the university's 360/75 and programmed in ForTran using the WatFor (University of WATerloo, FORtran IV) compiler.

I remember sophomore or junior year in college (I graduated in '96) watching a (engineering) professor being dumbfounded when he gave a homework assigment for the students to write a FORTRAN program to accomplish a certain task (don't remember what it was, now) and discovering to his horror that not a single person in the class (YT included) had any clue where to even begin. Time marches on...

And then there was the programming class that all engineering students were required to take that involved C programming but instead of using C++ like everyone else in the entire universe did, used some weird complier that ran on Macs that I could never get to work. I didn't do well in that class because none of the students that I attempted to work with or even the TAs could figure out why the seemingly correct programs that I (and my friends) wrote would crash the compiler without any clue as to why. I blame that POS compiler for my lack of desire to take any subsequent programming classes, which I now regret.

nate

Do you mean that they had no idea how to write a ForTran program, or had no idea how to program in any language?

I used to teach (assembler) programming at a small college. I was amazed at how little these *senior* CS students knew about programming. Only about two-in-five could convert a decimal to binary (or verse visa) and *maybe* one of those could write an algorithm for a computer to do it. It was no wonder they were constantly complaining about the lack of CS jobs.

C and in particular the C++ dialect is a lousy language to teach programming. That said, teaching anything without working tools is malpractice.

If there were online terminals instead of punch cards when I was in college, there would have been a decent chance that I'd have gone into CS, something I certainly would have regretted.

That's what the ? in 36? was all about.

That's what my brother learned on when he was doing his civil engineering tech course at Conestoga College a couple years later - they switched to WatFive while he was there. They had a Honeywell at the college that basically never worked (they refered to it as the "honey wagon" computer.

To TEACH programming effectively you really nead a "structured" programming language that forces you to write clean code.

C++ is one reason there is so much "bloatware" out there.

The 170 in my 63 valiant was fast enough to bury the speedo. 60 in

The 225 in my '69 was good for 104mph at half throttle, and the same wide open (just burned more gas). It would do 100 MPH for hours on end.(and did, across the midwest and the Canadian Prairies).

Both were slightly "tuned".

The 74 sport (225) was good for just over the 100, box stock. All 3 were automatics. Neither was particularly quick off the line.

snipped-for-privacy@snyder.on.ca wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:

man, I loved my 78 Chrysler New Yorker.