In article
<5d3988b0-f0ee-475e-9e30-5071a087d39b@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>,
"R.Nicholson" <rhnlogic@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>The article says that at 4 a.m. on May 1st, 1964, Kemeny and Kurtz ran
>their first BASIC program on Dartmouth college's General Electric
>GE-225 mainframe.
Interesting, before I read this I would have been happy to say the
language I was briefly introduced to on a GE-225 at UQ was BASIC.
But that was in 1963! So, does anyone out there recall what *was* the
actual "user language" on that beast in those days? Attempting to
dredge the dark recesses of 45-year-old memory I find flutterings of
an answer... but nothing definite.
Clearly, I didn't get sufficiently involved then to actually write a
program. :) AFAICR the early lectures all involved matrix algebra
(which I'd never studied as such) and went so far over my head that I
decided I had better things to do with my time.
I guess they were leading into a discussion of data arrays and such,
but they way they presented it was incomprehensible to me. Buggered
if I know why they felt the need to do it that way -- arrays as such
are perfectly simple concepts. Perhaps lecturers don't get paid if
they make things too easy. ;-)
>(Thankfully, they continued program language development beyond
>their Dartmouth Oversimplified Programming Experiment , or this
>group [c.l.b.m] might have had the much less desirable name:
comp.lang.DOPE :)
Addendum: I had a quick Google for "GE-225 University Queensland" and
turned up quite a bit of stuff, including this page:
<http://www.computer.museum.uq.edu.au/do***ents.html>
which contains a *long* list of ancient manuals (both hardware and
software) for GE, DEC (PDP-8 and PDP-10), VT55, VAX/VMS and other bits
and pieces, all in PDF format! [But most are bloody big files!]
Readers of comp.lang.basic.misc [c.l.b.m] may be interested in these:
GIGI BASIC Manual [30 MB] <http://www.computer.museum.uq.edu.
au/pdf/AA-K335A-TK%20GIGI%20BASIC%20Manual.pdf>
DECsystem10 Basic Language Reference Card (Version 17B) [9 MB]
<http://www.computer.museum.uq.edu.
au/pdf/DEC-10-XBRCA-A-D%20DECsystem10%20Basic%20Language%20Reference%2
0Card%20(Version%2017B).pdf>
Cheers, Phred.
--
ppnerkDELETE@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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