From: "John W. Kennedy" <jwkenne@...>
Date: 2007-07-19T02:15:01+09:00
Subject: Re: Taking the bull by its horns [was background]

Morton Goldberg wrote:
> On Jul 17, 2007, at 11:24 PM, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote:
> 
>> Dang ... someone beat me out for "doing it the longest". Not by much,
>> though.
> 
> I also began programming on an IBM 650 (in 1958). Oh, the fond memories: 
> the glow of vacuum tubes, SOAP II [*], clearing card jams from both ends 
> of the reader/punch unit, the 25-millisecond latency of drum memory :)
> 
> By 1961, I had already moved to the IBM 1620, a great improvement over 
> the 650. But my all-time favorite computer remains the DEC PDP-11 (the 
> original, not the VAX-11).
> 
> Regards, Morton
> 
> [*] an ancient assembly language -- nothing to do with XML messaging.

You missed the fun part -- it was an /optimizing/ assembler.


-- 
John W. Kennedy
"The bright critics assembled in this volume will doubtless show, in 
their sophisticated and ingenious new ways, that, just as /Pooh/ is 
suffused with humanism, our humanism itself, at this late date, has 
become full of /Pooh./"
   -- Frederick Crews.  "Postmodern Pooh", Preface