I was lucky. Our high school system shared a DEC PDP-8. This was in 1974. Each year, Digital equipment would publish a manual. Some years were better than others. Somewhat like a vintage wine. The choice of languages for the PDP-8 were Basic, Fortran, and Focal. It also had a user group called Decus, which shared code - somewhat akin to GitHub. But, I didn't use much of that code, as it usually meant hand entering the source into a teletype. The storage medium was paper tape.
An alternative to the PDP-8 was the one class in writing Cobol on a mainframe. You had to hand write code on a huge ledger sheet, translate that into punched cards, submit a job, and wait a couple days for the result. Most of my coder buddies thought that was a joke.
Instead we stuck with PDP-8. Because the computer was shared by several schools, there was a huge inter-school rivalry. We would hack accounts, and write incendiary messages in the other school's directory, which could only be erased by writing assembly code.
When I went to university, the first computer science courses still used punched cards. The classes were incredibly boring: with PL-1 examples of how to move pieces around a chess board. No AI. In high school, we were already writing chess player programs, multi-user star wars, compression, social engineering, and infinite precision math packages.
So, I was a bit judgmental about the quality of the University courses and missed out on some important lessons. My first language was Basic. So, my code was a meandering mess of spaghetti. It took a years to unlearn that self-inflicted pedagogical brain damage.
Now, with SO + Git, coding feels like assembling flat-packed Ikea furniture.
In 1974 I was (the equivalent of) a junior in high school in South Africa. Back then we called it "Form 4", fwiw.
* Number of computers at high school: Zero
* Number of computers to which we had access: Zero
A friend and I joined the school computer club. I think we were the only members.
We were allowed to sit in on a FORTRAN IV programming course at the local university, and use their IBM 360/50 mainframe via golfball ttys. We were even allowed to write the exam, which we failed spectacularly.
We would have killed for a PDP-8 (if we even knew what that was, frankly). There was no such thing as "online".
"And you tell that to the kids today? They won't believe ya!"
To load the OS, you first had to hand key in a bootstrap loader in octal (base 8) on the front panel. The loader would then read the OS from paper tape into magnetic core.
Our computer was a PDP-8/i. Someone mentioned that the PDP-8/i was about as powerful as a Raspberry Pi. So, imagine a half dozen schools timesharing a Raspberry Pi.
Currently, I'm writing for the Apple Watch, which is more powerful than a Cray-2 -- a supercomputer that cost $16 Million in 1984.
> To load the OS, you first had to hand key in a bootstrap loader in octal (base 8) on the front panel.
When I eventually got to university in 1978, we had a PDP-11 of some sort, and I recall entering the boot program by setting the address and data toggle switches and booting from paper tape. I have no idea if it was core memory.
An alternative to the PDP-8 was the one class in writing Cobol on a mainframe. You had to hand write code on a huge ledger sheet, translate that into punched cards, submit a job, and wait a couple days for the result. Most of my coder buddies thought that was a joke.
Instead we stuck with PDP-8. Because the computer was shared by several schools, there was a huge inter-school rivalry. We would hack accounts, and write incendiary messages in the other school's directory, which could only be erased by writing assembly code.
When I went to university, the first computer science courses still used punched cards. The classes were incredibly boring: with PL-1 examples of how to move pieces around a chess board. No AI. In high school, we were already writing chess player programs, multi-user star wars, compression, social engineering, and infinite precision math packages.
So, I was a bit judgmental about the quality of the University courses and missed out on some important lessons. My first language was Basic. So, my code was a meandering mess of spaghetti. It took a years to unlearn that self-inflicted pedagogical brain damage.
Now, with SO + Git, coding feels like assembling flat-packed Ikea furniture.
[UPDATE] grammar