From: Morton Goldberg <m_goldberg@...>
Date: 2007-07-19T08:41:42+09:00
Subject: Re: Taking the bull by its horns [was background]

On Jul 18, 2007, at 1:15 PM, John W. Kennedy wrote:

> 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.

Optimizing, schmoptizing -- the only optimization it performed was to  
take the drum latency into account when it assigned an instruction to  
a location on the drum. You think computing the effect of drum  
latency was the fun part? You sure have weird ideas of fun :)

SOAP = Semi-Optimizing Assembly Program (IIRC)

Regards, Morton