Real Old School Programming (was: Re: Where to buy a Selectric?)

[Bryan Pope]

Chuck,

	This thread has really piqued my interest since I am a 
programmer.  (Hey, the OS I program under almost falls into the 
10 year rule!) ;)

> 
> This really brings the topic around to an aspect of "vintage" computing
> that I suspect most folks don't remember much (or want to forget).
> 
> Programming before the days of widely-available online terminals looked
> like this:
> 
> 1.  Think about what you want to do.
> 
> 2.  Chart it out (flowchart if you were a stickler, but otherwise draw some
> boxes on a sheet of paper to remind you.
> 
> 3.  Code up your task using a no. 2 pencil on a pile of coding forms.
> 

What do these coding forms look like?


> 4.  Send the coding form to keypunch (or keypunch it yourself if that was
> allowed).
> 
> 5.  When the card deck comes back (usually within a day or two), get an
> 80-80 listing if one was not provided.  Swear under your breath at the
> %##$% keypunch operator who decided that a zero should sometimes be an
> "oh", regardless of the way you wrote it.  Mark and make your corrections
> on one of the "10 minute limit" keypunches.  Get a new 80-80 of the
> corrected deck.
> 

What is an 80-80 listing?  Was that the output from your program?


> 6.  Batch the deck up with the necessary JCL and submit it with any other
> tapes, etc. at the I/O desk.

JCL - Job Control Language?

> 
> 7.  Barring problems, a few hours later, your deck, etc.  will be delivered
> back to your desk with the abend dump that invariably seemed to result.
> 

What is "abend"?


> 8.  Scratch your head and try to figure out what went wrong--and restart
> the process all over again.
> 
> Those steps 6, 7 and 8 are why I got into OS--you can't debug an operating
> system on a timeshare basis.  So you sign up for block time in the dead of
> night, which pretty much absolved you from attending anything but
> department meetings.  You could go weeks without seeing your boss.
> 
> I remember when the first online terminals made their appearance--the
> managers were shocked that you could just type in source code and run it.
> The reaction was that quality would suffer horribly.
> 
> After all these years, I'm not sure.  The old way, because of the huge cost
> in time of mistakes, did tend to make one's approach far more deliberate.
> There were lots of hours of "stare at the listing and think about what's
> going to happen"--and I think that the deep understanding of what one's
> code actually is doing (with all of the side effects) is the big
> time-eater.  
> 

But it is better to waste time while programming making sure it is right 
then to fix it when it blows up at a client site...

Cheers,

Bryan

> The same scenario applies to writing.  One can bang out a
> stream-of-consciousness prose and then go back many times to clean it up,
> or one can form a prize paragraph of almost crystalline beauty in one's
> mind and transcribe it fully-formed.
> 
> I'm not convinced that either way is more productive than the other--or is
> any faster.
> 
> Cheers,
> Chuck
>  
>