Old Programming Language

[GeraldSommariva]

Originally Posted by G6Tanuki

One of my clients ran a Convex C-1 back in the late-1980s: it was an apparently-cheap alternative to buying-time on CRAYs etc but porting optimised-for Cray-parallelism code to the Convex was never easy; for 'fast turnround' jobs they still often had to rent Cray-time.

[My involvement was largely around getting the C-1 to speak .uk.ac "Coloured Books" protocols and the then-protocols-of-the-day X.25/OSI 7-layer stuff - thankfully all that nonsense disappeared by about 1992 and we could run nice friendly TCP/IP - even though for a time IP-packets had to be encapsulated and tunneled over X.25 virtual-circuits]

I worked at Convex from 89 through to their acquisition by HP (Now HPE) September 1995. Those Coloured Book protocols kept us on our toes at Convex UK, as every time a new Convex OS release came out of the head office in Dallas USA we had to re-port these protocols.

Convex did have a number of systems in academia, including Oxford and Cambridge,therefore we had to support these protocols.
The University_of_London_Computer_Centre had a six processor C3800 supercomputer with a Convex C3200 front-end. looking at this site ULCC you can see a StorageTek Silo (robot) tape Library, which the Convex had to interface to.

But the most challenging task was getting the X21 interface working, I think in the end, we had to link to Convex's back in the UK office together in order to debug. So yes, thankfully all that nonsense disappeared.

ref here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coloured_Book_protocols not much on wikipedia given how many man hours were spent.

I am intrigued to know who your Convex client was ?

[GeraldSommariva]

Originally Posted by Slothie

[

$gfortran -std=gnu *.f95 -o main
$main
   14.5489998

(Done using Online Fortran Compiler https://www.tutorialspoint.com/compi...ran_online.php)

Looking at this site 10 Oldest Programming Languages Still in Use even C at number 6 was 1972 so nearly 50 years old.

I must thank Slothie for the Fortran code to solve the dice problem, its given me many hours of playing around with these old Programming Languages.

[GeraldSommariva]

Talking of old Programming Language

Did anyone write programs for the Psion Series 3 using its built-in programming language, OPL (Organiser/Open Programming Language) ?

I did a "Hello World" on my Psion 3A. Never got any further, well it worked, curiosity satisfied.

[Jon_G4MDC]

Oooh eck, I have some Psion3 stuff too.
Radio propagation formulae if I recall.

I think I had one collecting survey results in dBm from a Chase GPR receiver too.

[Slothie]

Originally Posted by GeraldSommariva

Talking of old Programming Language

Did anyone write programs for the Psion Series 3 using its built-in programming language, OPL (Organiser/Open Programming Language) ?

I wrote several programs for my 3mx, mostly for managing contacts as I was an IT contractor at the time. It turned out to be easier than I thought it would be, the only tricky thing was using the built in database from OPL, but I worked out how to use that well enough for my needs. I used the PC emulator to do most of the actual development because you could create a larger screen area and use the extra bits for debugging information. Then I would use PsyWin to transfer the programs to the Psion. I continued to use it for years, until the screen cable broke for the nth time and getting it repaired was getting expensive. I still miss it though, it was a great little tool.

[Buzby123]

I wrote lots of programmes on my II XP that exchanged messages using the CommsLink module. The messages were used to emulate devices that would be connected to PLCs. ( Weigh scales, bar code readers, etc. )

I seem to remember that OPL was really easy to use, but don't ask me to remember any of it now !.

Cheers,

Buzby

[SiriusHardware]

I remember it essentially being BASIC by another name. Probably why it was so nice to use.

I still have an LZ64, the official Psion serial interface for it and my copy of PsiWIN somwhere.

[Slothie]

Originally Posted by SiriusHardware

I remember it essentially being BASIC by another name. Probably why it was so nice to use.

I still have an LZ64, the official Psion serial interface for it and my copy of PsiWIN somwhere.

I suppose it was, it was the Graphics and Window extensions that made it easy to use though.

[ortek_service]

Originally Posted by Slothie

>>
>>
I continued to use it for years, until the screen cable broke for the nth time and getting it repaired was getting expensive. I still miss it though, it was a great little tool.

For the later 5-series, there was someone selling their own improved-design screen flexi-pcb ribbon cables, that apparently broke due to a design-fault with a stress crack occurring (from a close hole?) that split across it.

So maybe there was one done for the 3-series as well, although they did seem much-better on these as I've not seen any failures on these ones we had at work / on my ones (I think I've also got the OPL manuals for these).

[G4CMY_Tony]

Originally Posted by Dave Moll

That sounds like a description of APL (short for "A Programming Language").

I spent many years writing and maintaining systems written in APL. It was always regarded as a bit of a "black art" by many IT professionals but when you got into it you realised just how powerful it was.

The programmer had to remained disciplined though because you could easily write code that was elegant, efficient and powerful but very difficult to read or maintain.

I used it whilst working for an insurance company in pension scheme administration.

[bluepilot]

Originally Posted by G4CMY_Tony

The programmer had to remained disciplined though because you could easily write code that was elegant, efficient and powerful but very difficult to read or maintain.

I thought that was what was known as job security. Write the most obscure code you can. Back in the 1980s I once worked with a SEL 32 series machine. It came with SEL's very own version of Fortran, basically Fortran 77 with extensions, some of which were quite bizarre. One of them was the "inline" statement which enabled you to switch between Fortran and assembler in the middle of a routine. I found it quite useful. Luckily I'd left by the time the software had to be converted to the successor. Sadly they didn't manage a comefrom statement.

[GeraldSommariva]

Originally Posted by bluepilot

I thought that was what was known as job security. Write the most obscure code you can. Back in the 1980s I once worked with a SEL 32 series machine. It came with SEL's very own version of Fortran, basically Fortran 77 with extensions, some of which were quite bizarre. One of them was the "inline" statement which enabled you to switch between Fortran and assembler in the middle of a routine. I found it quite useful. Luckily I'd left by the time the software had to be converted to the successor. Sadly they didn't manage a comefrom statement.

I worked for SEL in the mid 80's when they were part of Gould Electronics most of systems did real time work including flight sim's running the MPX-32 operating system. The customer base did expand with the intro of UTX-32, Gould's version of Unix based on a BSD. what was the application you were working on ?

[bluepilot]

Originally Posted by GeraldSommariva

what was the application you were working on ?

ESOC's MSSS (second generation)

[GeraldSommariva]

Originally Posted by G4CMY_Tony

I spent many years writing and maintaining systems written in APL. It was always regarded as a bit of a "black art" by many IT professionals but when you got into it you realised just how powerful it was.

The programmer had to remained disciplined though because you could easily write code that was elegant, efficient and powerful but very difficult to read or maintain.

I used it whilst working for an insurance company in pension scheme administration.

I had a look at APL on the web and found this https://tryapl.org/ gives this example on dice

throws←?10000⍴6 Store 10 000 dice throws
+/1=throws Of 10 000 throws, how many 1s?
+/(⍳6)∘.=throws Frequency of all 6 possibilities

So I thought I would have a go at The Dice Problem in APL but it seams so different from other Programming Languages !