TexAgs91 said:

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Oh yes... As if COBOL wasn't warped enough, I had the hilarious Turkish prof Dr Yurtass teach it

"Don't tell me 'I know these things.' I know you know these things but the problem is you never do."

"You know what I always say, 'kill three birds with two stones'."

"You will never do this; that is the 1950's way of programming."

"PHP is hippy technology"

"We all know the difference between "regular" and "friend" functions already. It's just like real life: we let friends touch our private members, but if just anyone tries to touch them, we throw things. In this case, it would be compiler errors, but in the real world it's things like bricks."

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Dr Salih Yurttas? He was such a hoot! I audited his Java class in the 90s. Very nice Turkish Prof who was passionate about his work and students.

He seemed like he was shouting or screaming but he was just talking normally and passionately.
One of the best teachers at A&M CPSC.

Bocephus said:

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My father (who passed in 2024) is going to be very upset to find his COBOL skills are no longer required.

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My father who passed in 2023 used to program in Fortran in the mid to late 60s at TI. We still have some of his old punchcards at home.

infinity ag said:

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TexAgs91 said:

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Oh yes... As if COBOL wasn't warped enough, I had the hilarious Turkish prof Dr Yurtass teach it

"Don't tell me 'I know these things.' I know you know these things but the problem is you never do."

"You know what I always say, 'kill three birds with two stones'."

"You will never do this; that is the 1950's way of programming."

"PHP is hippy technology"

"We all know the difference between "regular" and "friend" functions already. It's just like real life: we let friends touch our private members, but if just anyone tries to touch them, we throw things. In this case, it would be compiler errors, but in the real world it's things like bricks."

---

Dr Salih Yurttas? He was such a hoot! I audited his Java class in the 90s. Very nice Turkish Prof who was passionate about his work and students.

He seemed like he was shouting or screaming but he was just talking normally and passionately.
One of the best teachers at A&M CPSC.

---

oh man 90's flashbacks.

infinity ag said:

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Bocephus said:

---

My father (who passed in 2024) is going to be very upset to find his COBOL skills are no longer required.

---

My father who passed in 2023 used to program in Fortran in the mid to late 60s at TI. We still have some of his old punchcards at home.

---

My dad had those cards left over from his time at A&M. I used to use them as bookmarks for whatever book I was reading when I was a kid. By the time I got to A&M, there were no punchcards.

AustinScubaAg said:

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infinity ag said:

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TexAgs91 said:

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Oh yes... As if COBOL wasn't warped enough, I had the hilarious Turkish prof Dr Yurtass teach it

"Don't tell me 'I know these things.' I know you know these things but the problem is you never do."

"You know what I always say, 'kill three birds with two stones'."

"You will never do this; that is the 1950's way of programming."

"PHP is hippy technology"

"We all know the difference between "regular" and "friend" functions already. It's just like real life: we let friends touch our private members, but if just anyone tries to touch them, we throw things. In this case, it would be compiler errors, but in the real world it's things like bricks."

---

Dr Salih Yurttas? He was such a hoot! I audited his Java class in the 90s. Very nice Turkish Prof who was passionate about his work and students.

He seemed like he was shouting or screaming but he was just talking normally and passionately.
One of the best teachers at A&M CPSC.

---

oh man 90's flashbacks.

---

Another very good Prof was Dr Walter Daugherity. Man was almost divine and godly in his conduct. But then he had a degree in Divinity from Harvard so I believe he was a genuinely a good person.

Enjoyed his class in Object Oriented Programming... very popular teacher.

Sad that some other Profs like Drs Lively, Pooch, Pradhan, Volz have passed.

infinity ag said:

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I am waiting for some idiot young hotshot CEO to arrogant declare that he now that he has AI, he doesn't need anyone else, unceremoniously layoff the 60+ age group of COBOL programmers and then get this army of H1Bs he shipped in from India at $30/hr to modernize the existing systems that process millions of dollars of transactions.

When can we see this funny event? I am waiting with popcorn.

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Good gawd, you're a broken record.

Cinco Ranch Aggie said:

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infinity ag said:

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Bocephus said:

---

My father (who passed in 2024) is going to be very upset to find his COBOL skills are no longer required.

---

My father who passed in 2023 used to program in Fortran in the mid to late 60s at TI. We still have some of his old punchcards at home.

---

My dad had those cards left over from his time at A&M. I used to use them as bookmarks for whatever book I was reading when I was a kid. By the time I got to A&M, there were no punchcards.

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What years were those cards your dad used? The ones my father used I believe are from 1969-1971. He was in the calculator division at TI. I still have his slide rule from the 60s.

infinity ag said:

---

Bocephus said:

---

My father (who passed in 2024) is going to be very upset to find his COBOL skills are no longer required.

---

My father who passed in 2023 used to program in Fortran in the mid to late 60s at TI. We still have some of his old punchcards at home.

---

I believe they were looking for COBOL programmers during Covid bc they needed to change the welfare programs in New Jersey and other states and they were all written in COBOL. I told my father his fee to come out of retirement was $1000 per hour. He remained retired.

CDUB98 said:

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infinity ag said:

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I am waiting for some idiot young hotshot CEO to arrogant declare that he now that he has AI, he doesn't need anyone else, unceremoniously layoff the 60+ age group of COBOL programmers and then get this army of H1Bs he shipped in from India at $30/hr to modernize the existing systems that process millions of dollars of transactions.

When can we see this funny event? I am waiting with popcorn.

---

Good gawd, you're a broken record.

---

But I have to be until I get through to you.
It's not an easy job to educate people who have been thoroughly brainwashed for decades.

infinity ag said:

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Cinco Ranch Aggie said:

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infinity ag said:

---

Bocephus said:

---

My father (who passed in 2024) is going to be very upset to find his COBOL skills are no longer required.

---

My father who passed in 2023 used to program in Fortran in the mid to late 60s at TI. We still have some of his old punchcards at home.

---

My dad had those cards left over from his time at A&M. I used to use them as bookmarks for whatever book I was reading when I was a kid. By the time I got to A&M, there were no punchcards.

---

What years were those cards your dad used? The ones my father used I believe are from 1969-1971. He was in the calculator division at TI. I still have his slide rule from the 60s.

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Late 50s, early 60s would be the time frame he was at A&M (the first time). He went back as a retiree and actually finished what he started way back then in 2005. I also have all of his slide rules (he had 2 or 3, different sizes). He tried to teach me how to use the slide rule, but that didn't take very well when the calculator was whispering sweet nothings in my ears.

Sid Farkas said:

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Punch cards, Wilbur...and Fortran or gtfo.

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Never used Wilbur but did learn FORTRAN at A&M. Which is good since I spent most of my life coding in it.

The Def...ahem...War Department and all the Defense (or is it War?) contractors have it all over the place.

Lots of code built in the 60s and 70s still around running things - especially flight simulators.

I did my best to get rid of every abomination of the command GOTO when I saw one.

Does anyone know the language used for the programs in the spacecraft Apollo 11 which took Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to the Moon?

(assuming all this is true and it wasn't shot in Utah!)

Quote:

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abomination of the command GOTO

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DAMMITT!!

That's how us stupid people got things work.

Ag with kids said:

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Sid Farkas said:

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Punch cards, Wilbur...and Fortran or gtfo.

---

Never used Wilbur but did learn FORTRAN at A&M. Which is good since I spent most of my life coding in it.

The Def...ahem...War Department and all the Defense (or is it War?) contractors have it all over the place.

Lots of code built in the 60s and 70s still around running things - especially flight simulators.

I did my best to get rid of every abomination of the command GOTO when I saw one.

---

GOTO and GOSUB (BASIC)

Ah... good times....

infinity ag said:

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Bocephus said:

---

My father (who passed in 2024) is going to be very upset to find his COBOL skills are no longer required.

---

My father who passed in 2023 used to program in Fortran in the mid to late 60s at TI. We still have some of his old punchcards at home.

---

When I first started at LTV in 1992 my computer was in the room that held all the computer cards for both the Near Earth Mission Analysis Routine (NEMAR) and all the input decks for every run they'd ever done. Buttload of filecabinets filled to the brim (the program was probably written before FORTRAN 66).

NEMAR used to take about 2 hrs to run on the VAX when I got there (no more punchcards). When we ported it to a unix system later that year, it ran in 7 seconds. First time, I thought it had failed (did this often because you'd have one digit out of place in the input file and it crapped out).

Ag with kids said:

---

infinity ag said:

---

Bocephus said:

---

My father (who passed in 2024) is going to be very upset to find his COBOL skills are no longer required.

---

My father who passed in 2023 used to program in Fortran in the mid to late 60s at TI. We still have some of his old punchcards at home.

---

When I first started at LTV in 1992 my computer was in the room that held all the computer cards for both the Near Earth Mission Analysis Routine (NEMAR) and all the input decks for every run they'd ever done. Buttload of filecabinets filled to the brim.

NEMAR used to take about 2 hrs to run on the VAX when I got there (no more punchcards). When we ported it to a unix system later that year, it ran in 7 seconds. First time, I thought it had failed (did this often because you'd have one digit out of place in the input file and it crapped out).

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This was how it was in the 60s (my dad's time). He had to write his programs in his office (he started as an engineer in 1966 but still was given an office!) and he or someone had to carry the punchcards to a large computer that was in a room. I am not sure but I think the computer was in a sterile air-conditioned room where no footwear was allowed. No idea who actually did the punching of the cards, the engineers or someone else.

infinity ag said:

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Does anyone know the language used for the programs in the spacecraft Apollo 11 which took Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to the Moon?

(assuming all this is true and it wasn't shot in Utah!)

---

Assembly. Although it was a special flavor of Assembly (.agc).

Apollo 11 Guidance Control Code Repository

A famous photo for those in tech.


Margaret Hamilton in 1969, standing next to listings of software her and her MIT team produced for the Apollo project. Credit: MIT/Draper Lab; restored by A. Cuerden.

This is how software used to be written.


The Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum holds in its collections the Apollo Flight Guidance Computer Software Collection (above, page number 45506-A) created by Hamilton and her team. National Air and Space Museum

Wow... memories

"After 10pm at the RCC" that was "happy hour" you could use (if memory serves) up to 2 seconds of core time free.

FORTRAN punch cards - always too lazy to use the numbering column, so when you dropped your deck it was a pain.

Pretty sure it was "wylber"? Used in 1978 staring grad school when it was "new", in undergrad we had to use punch card machines. I had no clue that wylber was line oriented (essentially punch cards on a screen) and not screen oriented. There's two hours of my life I never got back.

Graduate research was code, all in FORTRAN. When you sent a request for a tape reel change and it took too long, you went to the basement to operations, when they opened their window it was all pizza boxes and marijuana smoke.

One time at 5AM I looked at the seedy miscreants who were always there and realized I'd become one.

Slide rule. Fall 1973 were the last Engineering 101 classes that taught slide rule. I still think that it was useful, we seemed to have an analog notion of what answers should be and were better at looking at an answer and thinking "that just doesn't look right".

looked it up:

Quote:

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Old IBM card entry for systems using WYLBUR (often stylized as Wylber)

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Does anyone else remember FORTH?

infinity ag said:

---

Ag with kids said:

---

Sid Farkas said:

---

Punch cards, Wilbur...and Fortran or gtfo.

---

Never used Wilbur but did learn FORTRAN at A&M. Which is good since I spent most of my life coding in it.

The Def...ahem...War Department and all the Defense (or is it War?) contractors have it all over the place.

Lots of code built in the 60s and 70s still around running things - especially flight simulators.

I did my best to get rid of every abomination of the command GOTO when I saw one.

---

GOTO and GOSUB (BASIC)

Ah... good times....

---

I grew up learning BASIC. A magazine I subscribed to in the early 1990's still included BASIC program listings.

Kids today have learned the "goto is evil" mantra without understanding why GOTO was hated so much.

Logos Stick said:

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The Sun said:

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Max Stonetrail said:

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In 2026, was IBM really deriving that much revenue from COBOL? If that is what caused this, seems overdone.

On another note, COBOL is so wordy and long, it's no surprise that it has even take AI a few years to crank anything out.

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IBM charges a lot for COBOL and its compilers. I don't know why this news would effect IBM stock though as they just sell the licensing to it. Faster methods of writing COBOL shouldn't effect their revenue.

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It's my understanding that most of that COBOL runs on 360 mainframes. IBM makes lots of money from leases and services on that infrastructure.

The thinking is that Claude ingests the COBOL and spits out Python or Go or whatever and that runs on Linux instead. It's about the transition away from it.

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COBOL gross. Poor Claude, I bet it pukes all over its Python output. That crap should have died out by 2001. Good riddance. Need the green puke emoticon

COBOL was my least favorite language, that's for sure. FORTRAN was so much easier and forgiving. What was it, 4 defined sections or areas in a COBOL program? One of them was variable definition if I recall correctly.

All the talk about punch cards and dads, my dad was a Chem E major at U of H in the mid 50s and took a computer class as an elective. The problem was they didn't have a mainframe at UH at that point. So Dad and his fellow students would complie their punch cards, put rubber bands around them and put a slip of paper with their names on them. Someone picked them up and drove them to College Station to process on A&M's mainframe, then deliver the results back to the students in Houston the next day.

IIIHorn said:

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Does anyone else remember FORTH?

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Only the Firth.

is this the first technological revolution in history

where one company (anthropic)

destroys the rest of the entire economy and yet has few employees?

COBOL and Y2K landed me my first job in 98 at American National Insurance Company.

I haven't worked in it since 99, but I might pick up a COBOL job right before I retire just for fun.

Reading this thread was a hoot until I realized that everyone on TexAgs is old.

LMCane said:

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is this the first technological revolution in history

where one company (anthropic)

destroys the rest of the entire economy and yet has few employees?

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Hold your horses. Nothing is destroyed yet. Let it happen before we all comment./

Cinco Ranch Aggie said:

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infinity ag said:

---

Cinco Ranch Aggie said:

---

infinity ag said:

---

Bocephus said:

---

My father (who passed in 2024) is going to be very upset to find his COBOL skills are no longer required.

---

My father who passed in 2023 used to program in Fortran in the mid to late 60s at TI. We still have some of his old punchcards at home.

---

My dad had those cards left over from his time at A&M. I used to use them as bookmarks for whatever book I was reading when I was a kid. By the time I got to A&M, there were no punchcards.

---

What years were those cards your dad used? The ones my father used I believe are from 1969-1971. He was in the calculator division at TI. I still have his slide rule from the 60s.

---

Late 50s, early 60s would be the time frame he was at A&M (the first time). He went back as a retiree and actually finished what he started way back then in 2005. I also have all of his slide rules (he had 2 or 3, different sizes). He tried to teach me how to use the slide rule, but that didn't take very well when the calculator was whispering sweet nothings in my ears.

---

I only had two slide rules! One was a very nice high quality one of my father's that was made, I think, from bamboo or something like it. The other was a much cheaper slide rule that they were selling in my high school for the few of us who needed one.

The nicer one is still in my desk drawer. The cheaper one is, I think, in my old footlocker.

Ag with kids said:

---

Sid Farkas said:

---

Punch cards, Wilbur...and Fortran or gtfo.

---

Never used Wilbur but did learn FORTRAN at A&M. Which is good since I spent most of my life coding in it.

The Def...ahem...War Department and all the Defense (or is it War?) contractors have it all over the place.

Lots of code built in the 60s and 70s still around running things - especially flight simulators.

I did my best to get rid of every abomination of the command GOTO when I saw one.

---

In the 1970s, one of my profs said that FORTRAN would be around for a very long time because every important numerical analysis algorithm had been written in FORTRAN and vetted as being accurate. According to him, the cost of doing all that in another language was just too expensive.

cecil77 said:

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Wow... memories

"After 10pm at the RCC" that was "happy hour" you could use (if memory serves) up to 2 seconds of core time free.

FORTRAN punch cards - always too lazy to use the numbering column, so when you dropped your deck it was a pain.

Pretty sure it was "wylber"? Used in 1978 staring grad school when it was "new", in undergrad we had to use punch card machines. I had no clue that wylber was line oriented (essentially punch cards on a screen) and not screen oriented. There's two hours of my life I never got back.

Graduate research was code, all in FORTRAN. When you sent a request for a tape reel change and it took too long, you went to the basement to operations, when they opened their window it was all pizza boxes and marijuana smoke.

One time at 5AM I looked at the seedy miscreants who were always there and realized I'd become one.

Slide rule. Fall 1973 were the last Engineering 101 classes that taught slide rule. I still think that it was useful, we seemed to have an analog notion of what answers should be and were better at looking at an answer and thinking "that just doesn't look right".

looked it up:

Quote:

---

Old IBM card entry for systems using WYLBUR (often stylized as Wylber)

---

---

A diagonal marker line across the side of the deck definitely helped with dropped decks.

CDUB98 said:

---

Quote:

---

abomination of the command GOTO

---

DAMMITT!!

That's how us stupid people got things work.

---

Every computer that I know of uses the equivalent of GOTO's at the assembler level.

Also, GOTO's can be very useful even today.

For example, suppose you have a C function in which several conditions can result in errors. Instead of having to do all of your cleanup every time you need to return, you can put a GOTO to the end of your function, do all of your cleanup, and then return.

Suppose that the function opened five files that need to be closed before returning, instead of having to close them for every possible return, you just have to close them them once at the end leaving less room for errors.

When I was a grad student, I was often the one selected to handle the numerical analysis labs. The worst abuse of GOTO's that I ever saw was when dong the numerical analysis labs one year. One student turned in a program with a GOTO arter almost every line. When I asked about it, the student said that she had dropped the card deck and things got out of order, so she reordered them with GOGO cards instead of sorting them in order.

El Gato Charro said:

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COBOL and Y2K landed me my first job in 98 at American National Insurance Company.

I haven't worked in it since 99, but I might pick up a COBOL job right before I retire just for fun.

Reading this thread was a hoot until I realized that everyone on TexAgs is old.

---

I was working in Ada when we did our Y2K exercise...yuck.

eric76 said:

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Ag with kids said:

---

Sid Farkas said:

---

Punch cards, Wilbur...and Fortran or gtfo.

---

Never used Wilbur but did learn FORTRAN at A&M. Which is good since I spent most of my life coding in it.

The Def...ahem...War Department and all the Defense (or is it War?) contractors have it all over the place.

Lots of code built in the 60s and 70s still around running things - especially flight simulators.

I did my best to get rid of every abomination of the command GOTO when I saw one.

---

In the 1970s, one of my profs said that FORTRAN would be around for a very long time because every important numerical analysis algorithm had been written in FORTRAN and vetted as being accurate. According to him, the cost of doing all that in another language was just too expensive.

---

We explored rewriting a couple of our FORTRAN simulation math models in C or C++ but could never make a business case to management...

We'd say it would take several man-years to get done, and they'd ask what would the end result be. Well, it will do the exact same thing it does now, just in a different language.


Hard to sell man-years of effort for no effective change in the math model performance.

Ag with kids said:

---

infinity ag said:

---

Bocephus said:

---

My father (who passed in 2024) is going to be very upset to find his COBOL skills are no longer required.

---

My father who passed in 2023 used to program in Fortran in the mid to late 60s at TI. We still have some of his old punchcards at home.

---

When I first started at LTV in 1992 my computer was in the room that held all the computer cards for both the Near Earth Mission Analysis Routine (NEMAR) and all the input decks for every run they'd ever done. Buttload of filecabinets filled to the brim (the program was probably written before FORTRAN 66).

NEMAR used to take about 2 hrs to run on the VAX when I got there (no more punchcards). When we ported it to a unix system later that year, it ran in 7 seconds. First time, I thought it had failed (did this often because you'd have one digit out of place in the input file and it crapped out).

---

Shortly before April first in 1979, two math undergraduate students had a wonderful idea. They had noticed that the job numbers on the Amdahl 470 (it might have been the IBM 370 instead) were four digits long.

So they wanted to see what would happen if you issued enough stored procedures to run later to take up all of the job numbers. So they create 10,000 card decks, each with about four or five cards.

They had been planning on duplicating the same job card to be used for each job but I pointed out that it might be easy for the computer operator to just eliminate every job with that job card. So I wrote them a routine to generate 1,000 job cards with each having a different code at the start.

April 1 that year was on a Sunday. I would have gone to the RCC to watch the chaos they created, but there was a car race at Texas World Speedway and so I was out there until pretty late (press box staff). When I got back to town, I heard all about it.

When reading a job on the punch card reader, it would pause while checking to make sure that the credentials were correct. This pause was somewhere around a second, if I remember right. They would stick the cards on the the card reader and it would read a few cards, pause, read a few more cards, pause, ... . It took several minutes just to read one box of cards. They probably got a lot of dirty looks from the other students waiting to submit their card decks.

They managed to read in about 7,500 jobs before everything came to a complete halt. The computer was off line for something like an hour before it came back on with all of their jobs cleared off of it.

infinity ag said:

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A famous photo for those in tech.


Margaret Hamilton in 1969, standing next to listings of software her and her MIT team produced for the Apollo project. Credit: MIT/Draper Lab; restored by A. Cuerden.

This is how software used to be written.


The Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum holds in its collections the Apollo Flight Guidance Computer Software Collection (above, page number 45506-A) created by Hamilton and her team. National Air and Space Museum

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I loved that old fanfold greenbar paper.

I tried using it once to print C and C++ programs, but the line printer did uppercase only.