20 Dec
2023
20 Dec
'23
1:12 p.m.
As late as 1981, the university I attended had an IBM 1130. Mainly it
was programmed in Fortran IV (but only 5 letters allowed in an identifier,
not 6) but it also had a Cobol compiler.
The Cobol compiler read cards about 1 every 3/4 second. By contrast, when
the Fortran compiler was reading cards, it sounded like a machine gun firing.
I wrote a program similar to banner(1) but that made the big letters up
out of the actual letters in Fortran. Although the cards are long gone, I
still have the code. :-)
Arnold
Douglas McIlroy <douglas.mcilroy(a)dartmouth.edu> wrote:
Paul -- you
left out the other "feature" -- the noise, which was still
deafening even
with a model N1 and its cover.
It was indeed loud, but GE out-roared them with a blindingly fast card
reader. The machine had a supposedly gentle touch; it grabbed cards with
vacuum rather than tongs. But the make-and-break pneumatic explosions
sounded like a machine gun. A noise meter I borrowed from the Labs' tool
crib read 90db 6 feet away.
Doug