50 years of coding

This month, 50 years ago, I wrote my first working computer program. It was written in BEATHE and took a few tries to get correct. BEATHE stood for Burroughs Extended Algol, THE version. Let’s parse that for a moment.

Burroughs was a manufacturer of computers, which later merged with other companies to form Unisys, which today is mostly in IT services rather than hardware. Algol is one of the first block structured computer languages, of which Burroughs decided to create an extension, probably to make it more practical. Interestingly, they also found it worthwhile to create a special version for the THE (Technische Hogeschool Eindhoven, now known as Technical University Eindhoven). That ran on their B6700. So that language dialect and its compiler were designed to be run on a single computer.

The THE had 2 computers at the time, to my knowledge. The other being a Philips P9200 that provided interactive access (or timesharing as it was called back then).

My program produced a plot of a sine wave function on a line printer page. After creating a set of punched cards in a dedicated typing (data-entry) room, I took that deck to the input station where it was read into a card hopper. The input station was in a publicly accessible part of a large airconditioned machine room, the back of which was dedicated to a set of large cabinets that housed the actual components of the computer. After 10 -20 minutes or so the line printer would spew out a couple of pages, typically with an error message from the BEATHE compiler. Back to the card puncher…

I have programmed and worked in the IT industry for most of that half century. And as you can guess, there have been a lot of changes since. They’d make for great follow-up stories. Stay tuned, but don’t hold your breath. Which story would you like to see?