pdanes (2/22/2013)

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Bill Wehnert - The Tom Swift books (I had a set, too) weren't written by Asimov. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Swift

I've been a gadget-geek all my life, since I was a little kid, dismantling mom's vacuum cleaner to see what made all the noise (and then getting in trouble for not putting it back together - once I learned what was inside, I was no longer interested). My first experience with computing hardware was mechanical Marchant calculators, in the university physics labs where my father taught. Then came an electronic calculator with a CRT display a couple of inches square, about the size of a large typewriter and weighing considerably more. It could add, subtract, multiply, divide and remember one number. No square root. The first experience with real programming was a beginning Fortran course, at the university again, after a Vietnam-era tour in the Marine Corps. Univac 9300, 32KB of magnetic core memory, punched 80-column card input - the university's sole computer. Everything in the school ran on it, and students were given one run per day, in the evening, to hand in their deck of cards. Next morning, you could pick up your card deck and however many sheets of paper your job had generated, and go troubleshoot it. That evening, you could try again. If there was too much stuff for the operator to fit it all in, you had to wait until the next day. Sometimes, if the operator was feeling generous and the workload was light, you could persuade him to run a few things during lunch hour.

Even under such primitive conditions, once I discovered what those machines could do, I was hooked and have been at it ever since.

Rod Early (2/22/2013)

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I got a TI-99/4A computer in 1982 when I was a sophomore in high school...

pdanes (2/22/2013)

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Bill Wehnert - The Tom Swift books (I had a set, too) weren't written by Asimov. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Swift

... My first experience with computing hardware was mechanical Marchant calculators, in the university physics labs where my father taught. ...

Michael Valentine Jones (2/22/2013)

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I don’t see how this list could be complete without mentioning COBOL.

From the 1960s until about 1990 it was the language of choice for business programming with implementations on every major OS.

There are tremendous number of applications written in COBOL still running.

It might not be flashy, sexy, object-oriented, etc. but it continues to be a workhorse.

Eric M Russell (2/22/2013)

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COBOL can use indexed sequential files, but it still only does row by row cursor style batch processing. I guess it's a work horse on a big mainframe. When I attended university back in late 80's and early 90's, the database related courses were centered around COBOL. However, since then I've never been exposed to COBOL professionally except as part of a Y2K conversion where I had to port an AS400 based inventory system to SQL Server, copying tables and re-writing COBOL procedures as T-SQL. So I know how to read COBOL, but fortunately never had to develop with it.

Michael Valentine Jones (2/22/2013)

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COBOL can use SQL calls to various RDMS, depending on the environment, COBOL version, RDMS API, etc.

I am not sure if I know of any procedural language that does anything except row by row processing. Are there any set based languages besides SQL?

Eric M Russell (2/22/2013)That's right, RDMS and SQL made ISAM and COBOL obsolete 20 years ago.