4 ms·

Back in the 70s, when I was a teen, we had a set of Encyclopedia Britannica. It came with a service where you could send off for various pamphlets for more focu

Back in the 70s, when I was a teen, we had a set of Encyclopedia Britannica. It came with a service where you could send off for various pamphlets for more focused information. I sent away for a paper listing pi to 10k or maybe 100k digits. By the late 70s/early 80s, that was outdated, as I wrote code to find those for myself (though e to many places was far easier).

anditherobot 2y ago
That's a very cool accomplishment. What language did you use to write the code? I also have another question, did you witness the transition from punched cards to terminals?
- philiplu 2y ago
  This would have been assembly code, probably 6809 or 68000 system I had back then. 6809 would have required dumping intermediate data to a disk. I don't recall just when I first got a hard-disk, which would probably have been a massive 10 megabytes in size. And yes, I saw that transition. I learned to program using Fortran IV and IBM 11/30 assembly in the mid-70s, using punched cards. Wrote a MIXAL assembler and simulator for the minicomputer at the local college around 1976; it was about 7000 punched cards in length, all assembly. Got a Commodore PET in 1978, moved on to SS-50 based 6809 and 68008 systems in the late 70s/early 80s, with a serial terminal.
  - dhosek 2y ago
    You just reminded me of when I bought my first PC in 1990 and one of my former professors, on learning I had bought it with a 200MB hard drive declared that I was crazy to buy such a large hard drive because I would never fill it up.¹ ⸻ 1. Reader, I filled it up.
    - macintux 2y ago
      One of my more embarrassing memories (technical ones, anyway) was having an argument with a couple of friends in college in 1988/89. I felt that sure, an internal hard drive is a nice feature, but swapping floppies wasn't all that terrible. You could have made a significant amount of money betting against my technical predictions over the last few decades.

anditherobot 2y ago

That's a very cool accomplishment. What language did you use to write the code? I also have another question, did you witness the transition from punched cards to terminals?

philiplu 2y ago
This would have been assembly code, probably 6809 or 68000 system I had back then. 6809 would have required dumping intermediate data to a disk. I don't recall just when I first got a hard-disk, which would probably have been a massive 10 megabytes in size. And yes, I saw that transition. I learned to program using Fortran IV and IBM 11/30 assembly in the mid-70s, using punched cards. Wrote a MIXAL assembler and simulator for the minicomputer at the local college around 1976; it was about 7000 punched cards in length, all assembly. Got a Commodore PET in 1978, moved on to SS-50 based 6809 and 68008 systems in the late 70s/early 80s, with a serial terminal.
- dhosek 2y ago
  You just reminded me of when I bought my first PC in 1990 and one of my former professors, on learning I had bought it with a 200MB hard drive declared that I was crazy to buy such a large hard drive because I would never fill it up.¹ ⸻ 1. Reader, I filled it up.
  - macintux 2y ago
    One of my more embarrassing memories (technical ones, anyway) was having an argument with a couple of friends in college in 1988/89. I felt that sure, an internal hard drive is a nice feature, but swapping floppies wasn't all that terrible. You could have made a significant amount of money betting against my technical predictions over the last few decades.