From: Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com>
To: Rob Pike <robpike@gmail.com>
Cc: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society <tuhs@tuhs.org>
Subject: [TUHS] Re: SNOBOL and RATSNO
Date: Tue, 9 Aug 2022 06:56:31 -0700 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <20220809135631.GH20435@mcvoy.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <CAKzdPgzAOAt4pdw7-AE226zxoubNjJeAhYmAfKMOxWCO4H2d-Q@mail.gmail.com>
On Tue, Aug 09, 2022 at 04:11:38PM +1000, Rob Pike wrote:
> We're probably well off topic now but...
>
> Many years ago I ran into Bob Dewar on a visit to Cambridge University and
> we got to talking. He said that the original implementation of SPITBOL, for
> the System/360, was in assembler (of course), and written by him and
> Belcher (?). The story he told was that they wrote it all down first, put
> it on punch cards, and sent it to the IBM machine. The next day they got
> back a listing with a bunch of errors. They iterated. By the fourth
> round???fifth day???they had a working SPITBOL.
>
> I still marvel at the productivity and precision of his generation of
> programmers.
I had the same reaction to pic(1). You could look at the code and "see"
what it was doing. I've always believed that pic was so well designed
because it took a day to get the print out (back then), so you had to
have a language where you could see what it was doing.
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2022-08-09 13:56 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 52+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2022-07-23 2:57 [TUHS] Line Numbers Before SysIII nl? BSD num? segaloco via TUHS
2022-07-23 5:56 ` [TUHS] " markus schnalke
2022-07-23 7:55 ` segaloco via TUHS
2022-07-23 11:01 ` Dan Cross
2022-07-23 11:20 ` John Cowan
2022-07-23 12:00 ` Dan Cross
2022-07-23 12:49 ` Norman Wilson
2022-07-23 13:20 ` Rob Pike
2022-07-23 13:36 ` Ralph Corderoy
2022-07-23 14:33 ` John Cowan
2022-07-24 19:45 ` Warner Losh
2022-07-24 20:33 ` segaloco via TUHS
2022-07-24 21:04 ` Warner Losh
2022-07-23 17:35 ` Clem Cole
2022-07-23 18:40 ` Phil Budne
2022-07-23 18:51 ` Nelson H. F. Beebe
2022-07-23 19:07 ` Douglas McIlroy
2022-07-24 19:02 ` Tomasz Rola
2022-07-28 0:30 ` Tomasz Rola
2022-07-28 1:03 ` Phil Budne
2022-07-28 4:13 ` [TUHS] SNOBOL and RATSNO William H. Mitchell
2022-07-29 4:28 ` [TUHS] " Dave Horsfall
2022-07-29 5:07 ` Tomasz Rola
2022-08-09 5:12 ` Jonathan Gevaryahu
2022-08-09 6:11 ` Rob Pike
2022-08-09 13:34 ` Clem Cole
2022-08-09 15:15 ` Andrew Hume
2022-08-09 18:26 ` Clem Cole
2022-08-09 18:52 ` Tom Teixeira
2022-08-09 21:25 ` Rob Pike
2022-08-09 15:39 ` Richard Salz
2022-08-09 13:56 ` Larry McVoy [this message]
2022-08-09 16:45 ` William H. Mitchell
2022-07-29 0:22 ` [TUHS] SNOBOL and progeny [Was: Re: Re: Line Numbers Before SysIII nl? BSD num?] Stuff Received
2022-07-29 5:01 ` [TUHS] " Charles H. Sauer
2022-07-29 14:07 ` John Cowan
2022-07-29 15:37 ` Dave Plonka
2022-08-09 17:42 [TUHS] Re: SNOBOL and RATSNO Noel Chiappa
2022-08-09 18:49 ` Larry McVoy
2022-08-09 18:54 ` Tom Teixeira
2022-08-09 19:00 ` Larry McVoy
2022-08-09 19:21 ` Marshall Conover
2022-08-09 20:19 ` Warner Losh
2022-08-10 21:13 ` Bill Cheswick
2022-08-10 21:30 ` John Cowan
2022-08-11 16:08 ` Marc Donner
2022-08-09 22:18 Douglas McIlroy
2022-08-09 22:25 ` Larry McVoy
2022-08-10 15:05 ` arnold
2022-08-10 17:14 ` Larry McVoy
2022-08-10 17:37 ` arnold
2022-08-10 18:24 ` joe mcguckin
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