[Info-vax] "Shanghai Stock Exchange" and OpenVMS

[AEF]

On Apr 2, 5:49 pm, billg... at cs.uofs.edu (Bill Gunshannon) wrote:
> In article <KfydncM6gdSCt0jUnZ2dnUVZ_oCdn... at giganews.com>,
>         "Richard B. Gilbert" <rgilber... at comcast.net> writes:
>
>
>
> > Bill Gunshannon wrote:
> >> In article <fxrX1XLbY... at eisner.encompasserve.org>,
> >>        koeh... at eisner.nospam.encompasserve.org (Bob Koehler) writes:
> >>> In article <hZ6dnSkmzc1-nefUnZ2dnUVZ_vWdn... at giganews.com>, "Richard B. Gilbert" <rgilber... at comcast.net> writes:
> >>>> Who are you calling "junior", junior?  I was VAXinated in 1984!  I
> >>>> started with VMS V3.x on a VAX 11/750.  Yeah, I was 4.something years
> >>>> late but I couldn't afford to buy my own; I had to wait for old
> >>>> moneybags to cough up the coins!
> >>>    All of us who got our first VAX when 11/780 was the only model,
> >>>    and it ran VAX-11/VMS 1.x, still get to think of you as a newcomer.
>
> >> Some of us had years (or even decades) of experience before the first
> >> VAX even came into existence, junior.  :-)
>
> > You may number me along with those of whom you speak.  I met my first
> > computer in 1967!  It was an SDS 730.  ISTR it had a whole 32K of
> > magnetic core memory.  I also worked briefly with a PDP-8.
>
> I took my first Company Sponsered Computer Class in 1968.  We used some
> kind of IBM mainframe but I was new and never got to actually see the
> machine.  By 1971 I was a night-shift computer operator on am IBM 1401
> and that was when I first learned to program (in Autocoder and in pure
> machine language).  Went on from there to COBOL, Fortran, Algol, PL/1,
> various assemblers and more other languages that were even more obscure.
> I have worked on more architectures than most of the faculty at my
> University have ever heard of.  And you know what, I really miss those
> days because what passes for "programming" today is really dismal in
> comparison.
>
> bill
>
> --
> Bill Gunshannon          |  de-moc-ra-cy (di mok' ra see) n.  Three wolves
> billg... at cs.scranton.edu |  and a sheep voting on what's for dinner.
> University of Scranton   |
> Scranton, Pennsylvania   |         #include <std.disclaimer.h>

My first computer was a 3-bit Digicomp I (!), circa late 60s or early
70s. (Yes, that's BITS, not BYTES!) It had three flip flops with logic
rods on the front and clock rods on the back (IITC). The CPU clock was
a pair of crank-connected plastic slider things that was human-
powered. It moved the metal "rods" that fell into open areas between
the logic rods and pushed the clock rods if the rod was allowed to
move in via the gates on top. You probably couldn't do more than about
1 - 1.5 Hz without breaking the thing. The programming was done by
varying placement of the logic rods that slid onto T and F tabs which
would block the thin metal "rods" which would push the programmable
plastic things on top (allowing AND and OR gates, IIRC) allowing the
rods on the other side to push the programmable clock rods (which slid
onto tabs on the back of each flip flop. "Programming" consisted of
putting the logic rods and clock rods in different places and varying
the connections between the logic rods and clock rods by the gates on
top. The output was a pair of 0 and 1 stickers on the end of each flop
flop. A narrow window would allow only one digit to be displayed at
one. So you could have 8 different values in the "register"!

Or something like that.

BTW, does a three-bit register count as 3 bits of memory? I suppose
either it does and/or it doesn't matter!

You could program rocket launches, counting, NIM, and other silly
things. But the manual taught you binary math and boolean algebra!

I totally agree with your last sentence about "programming". All these
fancy tools like multi-colored code and objects and pointers and
structured programming and gobs and gobs of memory available and STILL
much of it is crap.

AEF