US defence still using assembly language - cos it works
Discussion
As mentioned above unless there is a hardware fault, the programming will continue to work. To a certain extent they are probably written better than code these days. When I used to program I had to send it off to be entered so you made sure it worked (or at least you checked the code) as you wouldn't find out until tomorrow, then debug, another day etc...
Thankfully that didn't last too long and I could type stuff in myself.
Steve
Thankfully that didn't last too long and I could type stuff in myself.
Steve
Was thinking the same!
RobDickinson said:
even worse their launch code was 0000000 for 20 years...
http://gizmodo.com/for-20-years-the-nuclear-launch...
And these days I cant even pay the electric bill without trying to remember where Ive hidden the bit of paper with the obscure passwordhttp://gizmodo.com/for-20-years-the-nuclear-launch...
ETA Oh it's Electric lol
Sshhh dont tell anyone in case they want to pay the bill for me
There has to be a better way and if having effectively no password worked for 20 years wheres the problem?
CobolMan said:
nellystew said:
are you still using it?
Oh yes and we're still actively developing in it.I've been developing/supporting applications for a well known German car brand for 20 years - all of their Sales, Ordering, Production Planning, Shipping, Distribution, Warranty and Parts Supply processes all run on COBOL.
Some of these systems have been modernised to have a fancy new GUI but they all route back to a mainframe COBOL back-end. It is robust and great at handling high volume data.
I'm not sure if I agree with the 'loads of money to be made in these' angle, not yet anyway. The job market in the 90s was booming but is very quiet now, those that are in support and maintenance jobs tend to stay in them. There is a school of thought to say that the next ten years will see a lot ot retirees so the market will pick up, and I hope it does, but not convinced just yet.
Troubleatmill said:
s
t.
I remember my Uni days where you had to hand write into coding sheets - and pass to someone to type in.
A week later .... what you typed was entered into the computer
You had an hour to try it out.... and 99% of the time it failed because the typist bksed something up.
Tell that to kids of today and they won't believe you.
And yes... also had experience of punched cards, Assembler, Tape, even entering Hex...
Heck, my first real job was working in RPG II.
I had 99 places to store values... Wow!!!!
Happy days!!!!!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KG2M4ttzBnYt.I remember my Uni days where you had to hand write into coding sheets - and pass to someone to type in.
A week later .... what you typed was entered into the computer
You had an hour to try it out.... and 99% of the time it failed because the typist b
ksed something up.Tell that to kids of today and they won't believe you.
And yes... also had experience of punched cards, Assembler, Tape, even entering Hex...
Heck, my first real job was working in RPG II.
I had 99 places to store values... Wow!!!!
Happy days!!!!!
Computerphile channel (Notts uni professors) is great for learning about this kind of thing. Before my time of course, but very interesting. I could listen to this guy all day.
Guvernator said:
Almost every company\client I've worked at has had at least one legacy system running on 20+ year old hardware\software that people are just too scared to replace. This includes big banks, multi-nationals, the works. Hell the majority of the worlds ATM's still run on Windows XP as far as I am aware and that's 15 years old. It's actually pretty rife.
Local Co-op just had new self checkouts installed. They're awful. They run on XP.An older friend of mine was once telling me about his early days and punched cards.
Another of their sites a couple of miles down the road had installed a new mainframe that was much newer and quicker than the one at their site.
So much so it was quicker to get in a car with the cards, drive to the other site, run the program at the other site and come back with the results.
Another of their sites a couple of miles down the road had installed a new mainframe that was much newer and quicker than the one at their site.
So much so it was quicker to get in a car with the cards, drive to the other site, run the program at the other site and come back with the results.
over_the_hill said:
An older friend of mine was once telling me about his early days and punched cards.
Another of their sites a couple of miles down the road had installed a new mainframe that was much newer and quicker than the one at their site.
So much so it was quicker to get in a car with the cards, drive to the other site, run the program at the other site and come back with the results.
If he'd sent the office junior, he'd have been the creator of the Intern-netAnother of their sites a couple of miles down the road had installed a new mainframe that was much newer and quicker than the one at their site.
So much so it was quicker to get in a car with the cards, drive to the other site, run the program at the other site and come back with the results.
Otispunkmeyer said:
Guvernator said:
Almost every company\client I've worked at has had at least one legacy system running on 20+ year old hardware\software that people are just too scared to replace. This includes big banks, multi-nationals, the works. Hell the majority of the worlds ATM's still run on Windows XP as far as I am aware and that's 15 years old. It's actually pretty rife.
Local Co-op just had new self checkouts installed. They're awful. They run on XP.saaby93 said:
My first Programming job was on punched cards. I still have a load in my office, compile deck, execute, source etc. took them in to work recently to show the youngsters.
NNH said:
If he'd sent the office junior, he'd have been the creator of the Intern-net
A similar protocol was proposed some years ago;IPoAC (IP over Avian Carriers) protocol
They admit that latency is high, but throughput has the potential to be enormous.
I'm a bit surprised that no one has yet mentioned paper tape. It was the only option when I started my computer science course in 1970. At least it could be cut and spliced! The college computer was an ICL 1900, I think. On leaving college, I swore I would never touch Cobol again - and I haven't. First job after graduating was with an Elliot 803 - the only useful thing it could do was play Christmas carols on its speaker. Then along came the DEC PDP8. Great machines.
saaby93 said:
hell, that brings back some memorieswhen we where kids my dad used to bring olds ones of these home, and me and my sisters would spend hours cutting them up into bits with scissors....my mum used to go mad at the mess
At uni we wrote on coding sheets and they got typed on to cards for us. Luxury. When I started work thought and was wriig RPG all we had were hand punches. Althought in fairness after some practice you could 'type' really quicky. In order to press the required number of buttons simultaneouslty you kind of contorted your fingers in to different shapes for each column. And of course it didn't type text on the card so you had to be able to read them by just looking at the holes.
Then i moved on to assembler - 10K per user plus 10K common memory, and 2 x 4mb hard drives. But for all the restictions we were delivering robust and reliable systems. No 'blue screens', lock outs, crashes, core dumps or whatever.
Then i moved on to assembler - 10K per user plus 10K common memory, and 2 x 4mb hard drives. But for all the restictions we were delivering robust and reliable systems. No 'blue screens', lock outs, crashes, core dumps or whatever.
tvrolet said:
At uni we wrote on coding sheets and they got typed on to cards for us. Luxury. When I started work thought and was wriig RPG all we had were hand punches. Althought in fairness after some practice you could 'type' really quicky. In order to press the required number of buttons simultaneouslty you kind of contorted your fingers in to different shapes for each column. And of course it didn't type text on the card so you had to be able to read them by just looking at the holes.
Then i moved on to assembler - 10K per user plus 10K common memory, and 2 x 4mb hard drives. But for all the restictions we were delivering robust and reliable systems. No 'blue screens', lock outs, crashes, core dumps or whatever.
RPG used to drive me crazy, the logic of each record going through the whole program and effectively having to decide what didn't happen on each iteration used to fry my brain.Then i moved on to assembler - 10K per user plus 10K common memory, and 2 x 4mb hard drives. But for all the restictions we were delivering robust and reliable systems. No 'blue screens', lock outs, crashes, core dumps or whatever.
Assembler was pure heaven in comparison.
Troubleatmill said:
st.
I remember my Uni days where you had to hand write into coding sheets - and pass to someone to type in.
A week later .... what you typed was entered into the computer
You had an hour to try it out.... and 99% of the time it failed because the typist bksed something up.
Tell that to kids of today and they won't believe you.
And yes... also had experience of punched cards, Assembler, Tape, even entering Hex...
Heck, my first real job was working in RPG II.
I had 99 places to store values... Wow!!!!
Happy days!!!!!
At school (secondary 1 in 1969) much like the above. Only difference was that you wrote in coding sheets (Fortran IV), handed them in and in a week you got a pile of punched cards back which you ran through the IBM 360. 99% of the time it failed because you'd made an error in the coding. Repeat and try again in a week...t.I remember my Uni days where you had to hand write into coding sheets - and pass to someone to type in.
A week later .... what you typed was entered into the computer
You had an hour to try it out.... and 99% of the time it failed because the typist b
ksed something up.Tell that to kids of today and they won't believe you.
And yes... also had experience of punched cards, Assembler, Tape, even entering Hex...
Heck, my first real job was working in RPG II.
I had 99 places to store values... Wow!!!!
Happy days!!!!!
//JOB
//FOR
BrassMan said:
The way some people act you'd think webby Java bks was the only kind of code that existed these days.Fortran is a long way from dead and still very active.
Assembly is all over the place and still in as heavy use as it ever was whether in microcontrollers or embedded into C or whatever. Play with kernel code or do something needing SSE and you're right back to registers and mnemonics.
Jonesy23 said:
The way some people act you'd think webby Java bks was the only kind of code that existed these days.
Fortran is a long way from dead and still very active.
Assembly is all over the place and still in as heavy use as it ever was whether in microcontrollers or embedded into C or whatever. Play with kernel code or do something needing SSE and you're right back to registers and mnemonics.
You'd think wouldn't you?ks was the only kind of code that existed these days.Fortran is a long way from dead and still very active.
Assembly is all over the place and still in as heavy use as it ever was whether in microcontrollers or embedded into C or whatever. Play with kernel code or do something needing SSE and you're right back to registers and mnemonics.
As though Java/C#/Ruby had suddenly and finally defined programming languages, as though all applications are web based.
(yes, I have designed and coded in Java when it served the purpose. OOP is OOP.)
I've never done Cobol or Fortran. Some C and C++, but a long time ago and very amateurishly as a beginner.
Robert (Uncle Bob) C Martin does an interesting chat on what OOP languages gave us.
It boils down to an easier/safer way to have (have rather than emulate) polymorphism, utterly emasculating encapsulation in the process.
Personally, I have found that the majority of Java programmers I have worked with (with notable exceptions) have little grasp of type/class/object design, and frankly little or no grasp of the difference between the first two anyway.
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