When did you start?

by The Absolute Zero Wed Aug 03, 2011 4:26 pm

When I started it was 5.25" disks for a few months. No mouse! and it is DOS 2.0. Quickly moved to MS-DOS. Paint brush was all the window we could draw when the mouse came in with MS-DOS. Some programs like Turbo-C and Vitamin-C existed for coding. Huge market for Turbo Pascal, Turbo C.

FORTRAN ruled the main frames with Unix [....."core dumped" was the blue screen of death on unix ... :-)]

by Guest Wed Aug 03, 2011 11:07 pm

wow... 12th and 1st year was fortran and cobol, and were told it's mostly to understant the 'basics' and historical significance. Then there was MS-DOS... Our 3rd year assignments began being done in C and Unix. Then there was the all essential floppy disks.. what were those - 6.5?.

by Marathadi-Saamiyaar Thu Aug 04, 2011 12:14 am

The Absolute Zero wrote:When I started it was 5.25" disks for a few months. No mouse! and it is DOS 2.0. Quickly moved to MS-DOS. Paint brush was all the window we could draw when the mouse came in with MS-DOS. Some programs like Turbo-C and Vitamin-C existed for coding. Huge market for Turbo Pascal, Turbo C.

FORTRAN ruled the main frames with Unix [....."core dumped" was the blue screen of death on unix ... :-)]

How about 8 1/2" floppies with 130K storage (still have them and dont even know where to extract info from them)? Then Data general card readers and PDP-11

Practically watched the entire computer industry grow in front of me.

But it all started before IBM 360 and VAX machines.

by charvaka Thu Aug 04, 2011 1:00 am

Fortran was the first language I learned. Then C, C++ and Java. A year or two later, Bjarne Stroustrup gave a lecture to us at our office in Hyderabad -- that was good.

I still remember, in my first year in college, we went to our department for a visit. One of the geekier final years wanted to show us how great our department facilities were, so he used telnet to connect to some random server in the US. I was fascinated by that. Telnet, FTP, Gopher, that was the crap back then, before the world-wide web. My first browser was Lynx, running on VT52 and VT100 terminals attached to a Unix server. That is the setting in which I got hooked to computers. Then came Netscape on a HP-UX machine. I would spend nights in the computer lab doing random stuff on the Unix servers. I even did some assignments for beer. The institute used to charge students Rs. 500 to have an email account. It was beyond my budget, so I didn't get one. I finally got an email account once I started working. Kept up with Java, J2EE, EJB, .Net and all that crap for a few years. Now I don't remember any of it.

Uppili, I expected you to say: practically watched the entire industrial revolution grow in front of me. You disappointed me today.

by Merlot Daruwala Thu Aug 04, 2011 1:10 am

BASIC was my first language. Then Pascal. I was a cat at Turbo Pascal - I'd figured out how to read stuff from FAT files in DOS and my ambition those days was to write a virus. FORTRAN came later, I think in 3rd yr of engg. That was the last programming language I learned.

charvaka wrote:Uppili, I expected you to say: practically watched the entire industrial revolution grow in front of me. You disappointed me today.

by Marathadi-Saamiyaar Thu Aug 04, 2011 1:14 am

charvaka wrote:
Uppili, I expected you to say: practically watched the entire industrial revolution grow in front of me. You disappointed me today.

You are correct. But, as you very well know, I strictly stick to the subject matter...

by Another Brick Thu Aug 04, 2011 1:55 am

my graduation certificate believes that i am an electrical engineer although i don't work on anything electrical. when i was in college doing that 4-yr engineering course, we had this dreadful subject of Fortran 77. it became dreadful for me because the professor discouraged me on day 1 saying "hmm, vinod, you are from a small town. i don't think you will understand any of this. you will waste my time asking questions.' i never asked him any question in the class and did not understand even the basics of programming.

later when a s/w company hired me form the campus, they taught me unix and oracle. then i learnt some data warehousing tools which earn me my bread and butter till date.

by charvaka Thu Aug 04, 2011 2:10 am

Another Brick wrote:"hmm, vinod, you are from a small town. i don't think you will understand any of this. you will waste my time asking questions.' i never asked him any question in the class and did not understand even the basics of programming.

I had a professor who suggested that I do for my undergrad thesis a Fortran-based solution of the Navier-Stokes equation for a specific fluid dynamics problem. As a reference, he gave me a program that was submitted by a senior who had just graduated -- he said, "take this and build on it, enhance this matrix inversion to be more efficient." I took it, studied the code and tried to understand it. When I finally tried to compile it though it gave me a thousand compile-time errors. The professor had not even bothered to check that the program submitted by my senior compiles -- forget about getting any results.

by Another Brick Thu Aug 04, 2011 2:21 am

ayla! you did some serious stuff as your thesis. and i am surprised that an IIT professor was so careless as to not even compile the program.

by The Absolute Zero Thu Aug 04, 2011 8:18 am

charvaka wrote:Fortran-based solution of the Navier-Stokes equation for a specific fluid dynamics problem.

And after years of research the mighty institutions (a la MIT) found (by 60s) that the NSE have no solution actually, becuase they are non-linear. Wow, did your prof get a noble prize? BTW yes, they still use FORTRAN even today for these NSE's in fluid dynamics. FORTRAN is still the best. There are dozen of jobs you can still find with FORTRAN on monster.com

In my degree it was all 8080/8085 processor boards programming and building. Closing eyes even now, I can recall what those OpCodes are and can build a board from scratch. It was fun. Then came the barrage of C, Pascal, C++ and so on. Once I was interviewed at IIT Bombay where the professor asked if I knew what that IC chip xxxx was (hinting me as controller). I told him what it was and how to connect and all the bus configuration. His answer.. "wow!, if I continue to teach here, you are my guy, but unfortunately I am retiring!"

by The Absolute Zero Thu Aug 04, 2011 8:27 am

Marathadi-Saamiyaar wrote: How about 8 1/2" floppies with 130K storage (still have them and dont even know where to extract info from them)? Then Data general card readers and PDP-11

I actually saw them first time in the US when my advisor showed me. I thought he told me it was 7.5" disks. Just like a folder you carry. By then the disks were collecting dust and he was thinking to copy his data to smaller ones. Methinks Steve Jobs, by removing the 3.5" drive from Apple set a trend and urge for people to go smaller and result is USB drives.
BTW When using 3.5" disks one company came up with 100MB zip disks. I still have about 20 or 30 of them at home and the zip drive [of course gotten from the company where I worked :-))]. Do not know what to do with them so they stay in a box.

by Another Brick Thu Aug 04, 2011 8:31 am

The Absolute Zero wrote:
BTW When using 3.5" disks one company came up with 100MB zip disks. I still have about 20 or 30 of them at home and the zip drive [of course gotten from the company where I worked :-))]. Do not know what to do with them so they stay in a box.

i know one crazy man who collects grandfather clocks and other antique things. deala or no deala?

by The Absolute Zero Thu Aug 04, 2011 8:37 am

dealA (yeah "A" in caps!). Would trade all the disks *and* the drive, for the clock.

by Guest Thu Aug 04, 2011 8:50 am

i took a class in BASIC right after high school at a private institution. for practical training, we were taken to a company that used punched cards to store and feed data for payroll management. in college we had these huge dell computers with dumb servers. they hosted the college intranet and had emacs for word-processing. we learnt pascal on it. sun based unix servers had also just been introduced on which we learnt unix and C. of course, i had a mac with a modem. the modem served mainly to plug into the college intranet and to compuserve from where we could get shareware mac applications (games).

by Guest Thu Aug 04, 2011 8:57 am

Huzefa Kapasi wrote:in college we had these huge dell computers with dumb servers.

no, they weren't dell computers 'cos i notice dell started in 1984! i can't remember the name now.

edit. got it! dec-20 mainframes!

by Guest Thu Aug 04, 2011 9:58 am

I feel inadequately new...my first programming language was C (took the reverse route) learning it from a Schaum series book during 10th std...was elated to compile my first "Hello World" program - tears of joy streaming down my face - condensed by the AC in the computer lab, followed by a bout of sneezing. Good times!

Floppy disks in my time were those 3.5-inch. Like TAZ - I did learn 8085 & 8086 programming in my ECE days in B'lore (Sabeer Bhatia was the rage) but, don't remember anything - after forging a career in a completely different fieldU later...

by artood2 Thu Aug 04, 2011 11:39 am

The Absolute Zero wrote:
charvaka wrote:Fortran-based solution of the Navier-Stokes equation for a specific fluid dynamics problem.

And after years of research the mighty institutions (a la MIT) found (by 60s) that the NSE have no solution actually, becuase they are non-linear. Wow, did your prof get a noble prize? BTW yes, they still use FORTRAN even today for these NSE's in fluid dynamics. FORTRAN is still the best. There are dozen of jobs you can still find with FORTRAN on monster.com

In my degree it was all 8080/8085 processor boards programming and building. Closing eyes even now, I can recall what those OpCodes are and can build a board from scratch. It was fun. Then came the barrage of C, Pascal, C++ and so on. Once I was interviewed at IIT Bombay where the professor asked if I knew what that IC chip xxxx was (hinting me as controller). I told him what it was and how to connect and all the bus configuration. His answer.. "wow!, if I continue to teach here, you are my guy, but unfortunately I am retiring!"

Fortran is used today because it has a very good maths library and there is a lot of old code in Fortran. It is a fairly inadequate language.

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