Operating Systems > Linux and UNIX
w00t!!
Sleeping Dog:
PS
There is still some "argument" as to what was truly the first "computer" as we now think of the word. There was a gay guy who worked for British intelligence during WWII named Turing (sp) who developed a machine for cracking the German Enigma code. The brilliant little queen killed himself a few years later after getting popped on a morals charge by the Bobbies.
There was also ENIAC, which was developed during WWII on money from Uncle Sam. Its original purpose was to electronically calculate the trajectory of land based and naval artillery shells more rapidly than the mechanical calculators could do it,....thus increasing accuracy and rate of fire. It never went on line during that war because the war was over before they really got it to work right.
I had the distinct pleasure (?) in 1968 of taking a pioneer class at my high school called "Computer Programming" We learned a language called ITTRAN (father of FORTRAN). It ran on a vacuum tube computer that occupied the entire basement of a high-rise bank building (nearly an acre). The machine had the equiv. of 64 meg of RAM. All programs had to be quadruple checked by 4 different people before we could run them because, if anything put it in a loop (like factoring the square root of 2) they would have to shut it down to stop it. A shut-down meant that the techs had to go through the entire system and visually/manually check every vacuum tube in the system on restart.
I would be willing to bet three Oreos that there is still some brilliant old SOB out there who could trim enough fat off of Linux to make it run on that thing. Only problem is.....that old computer has probably now been recycled into at least 60 Chevy's that have already made it to the junkyard.
Keep the Fourth
Sleeping Dog
Master of Reality:
64 MEGS is tons of room for unix. LUnix runs on a C64 with only 64K of memory.
Sleeping Dog:
Baby Doll..........
I think that those folks heated the entire building building (30 floors) with that thing during the winter months.
We were just little high school students, but when we left that place, we glowed in the dark.
SD
Sleeping Dog:
By the way....I meant 64 K.
I have not used the "K" in so long that I have forgotten where it is.
Sleeping Dog
voidmain:
quote:Originally posted by Sleeping Dog:
I had the distinct pleasure (?) in 1968 of taking a pioneer class at my high school called "Computer Programming" We learned a language called ITTRAN (father of FORTRAN).
--- End quote ---
That's interesting. Do you know where I can find out more info on this? I programmed professionally on mainframes using FORTRAN 66 and 77. I thought FORTRAN 1 was orginally developed from scratch in the mid 50's.
[ July 01, 2002: Message edited by: VoidMain ]
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