From: "John W. Kennedy" <jwkenne@...>
Date: 2007-07-19T10:50:02+09:00
Subject: Re: Taking the bull by its horns [was background]

Morton Goldberg wrote:
> 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)

Symbolic Optimizing", I rather think.


-- 
John W. Kennedy
A proud member of the reality-based community.