In a response to [WayBack] Iris Classon on Twitter: “I’m curious, how many of you guys and gals have printed out code on paper to read later? Doing it during earlier years also counts 🤓”, I started the long read below starting with [WayBack] Jeroen Pluimers on Twitter: “Still do.… “.
Basically a more in depth coverage of my 2017 post Happy 60th birthday, Fortran.
[WayBack] Thread by @jpluimers: “@IrisClasson Still do. @IrisClasson There is a story behind these 1988 tractor feed print outs, which follows shortly. I should put dinosaur […]”
Still do.
There is a story behind these 1988 tractor feed print outs, which follows shortly.
I should put dinosaur or old-fart on my job description.
CC @isotopp
The story has to do with this.
A “translation” of [WayBack] Programming Fortran 77: A Structured Approach (ISBN-10: 0835956717) but I wish I had had the original back then, as in fact it was a knock off, mostly covering FORTRAN IV and 66.Sidestory: these books were from the same era.
Machine learning and AI modern?
They are about as modern as AWK. Both still relevant though.
AWK is indispensable on many *n*x related systems, especially the low powered one. The book is still the ultimate source on it; see [WayBack] stackoverflow.com/a/703174/29290text processing – Is there still any reason to learn AWK? – Stack Overflow
If you quickly learn the basics of awk, you can indeed do amazing things on the command line.
But the real reason to learn awk is to have an excuse to read the superb book The AWK Programming Language by its authors Aho, Kernighan, and Weinberger. You would think, from the name, that it simply teaches you awk. Actually, that is just the beginning. Launching into the vast array of problems that can be tackled once one is using a concise scripting language that makes string manipulation easy — and awk was one of the first — it proceeds to teach the reader how to implement a database, a parser, an interpreter, and (if memory serves me) a compiler for a small project-specific computer language! If only they had also programmed an example operating system using awk, the book would have been a fairly complete survey introduction to computer science!
Famously clear and concise, like the original C Language book, it also is a wonderful example of friendly technical writing done right. Even the index is a piece of craftsmanship.
Awk? If you know it, you’ll use it at the command-line occasionally, but for anything larger you’ll feel trapped, unable to access the wider features of your system and the Internet that something like Python provides access to. But the book? You’ll always be glad you read it!
Back to the story. With some side-steps to (:Here we go…
This is end 1980s. I was a student. A year later I started my own consultancy as a side-thing.The reason is that I had a client prospect for some PC Turbo Pascal programming. So I needed to buy some hardware. Only companies could buy hardware. So I started one.
2 years later, I was selling PC network hardware to a university research group, so they could connect to the internet. At 75% of what they would pay via their regular channels. My profit was large enough to cover for that year of studying.Back to the print-outs.
They were on tractor-feed paper en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuous_stationeryWe had a class: computer usage for chemistry students. It was mandatory. They were teaching from a FORTRAN 77 book that was in fact more FORTRAN IV and FORTRAN 66. Found a link to it too: [WayBack] Cursus Fortran 77, R.C. Holt, J.N.P. HumeThere were huge differences between these FORTRAN versions:The way you would program in that class was via PC terminals with serial terminal emulation, connected to a VAX 11/780 machine running VAX/VMS 4.7.
The connection was through a multiplexed serial over an unshielded ribbon cable some 300 yards long.The connection was very reliable: about 90% of the characters would transmit correctly.So I had to reset the VT52 terminal emulation over the Kermit protocol every minute or so, then wait a dozen seconds for the screen to re-draw.
At the chemistry department it was still a VAX 11/780 machine called HLERUL5, but at the computing department they had an 11/750 called RULCRI which was faster.They also had a bunch of VT100 terminals that could do 132-columns instead of 80, with a far more reliable connection.
Later the chemistry department also got their own VAX 11/750, renamed the old one to HLERUL52 for the 2nd years studens to to work on, and kept the old HLERUL5 name.
The machines were networked too, so you could connect to one, then daisy-chain your logon to the others.
Long story short: later I managed to get official accounts on both chemistry department machines, and borrow an account on the computing department one. So I had accounts on HLERUL5, HLERUL52 and access to RULCRI when needed.Later too, I found out that the room above the VAX 11/780 also had VT100 terminals (later even two VT240 terminals!). It wasn’t meant for student use though. But with some social engineering…In the mean time, I wanted to make better use of the VAX/VMS FORTRAN compiler.
Apart from that it fully supported FORTRAN 77, it also had many more language features and had support for 132 columns instead of just 80.
Given FORTRAN had limited use of the leftmost 8 columns, having 124 usable columns instead of just 72 made a huge difference in readability.There was no book in the library on VAX/VMS FORTRAN, but the on-line help was great: both vast and in-depth. With the bad serial documentation though, it was very hard to read on-line.The easiest way to read things was on paper. I think the printer back then was a LA36 DecWriter II or LA120 DecWriter III
Printing one topic at a time however was cumbersome. Print jobs were not always printed in the right order, and sending like a 100 print commands that all were slightly different was hard too.Luckily I found out two things:
- you could dump the output of a FORTRAN HELP page to a file
- you could recursively generate all FORTRAN HELP, then redirect that to a file
The recursion was great, as it would output everything in an orderly fashion. What was lacking though is a good table of contents. More on that in a bit.So I decided to send that file to the printer. Of course I knew that would take something like an hour, so I printed it during lunch time.I was back from lunch early to monitor the printing progress (VAX/VMS had queues for everything, and you could monitor the ones or the parts of ones you had access to!).The printer was right next to the VAX 11/780 and both of them were very noisy. The climate control was even noisier, which meant you wanted to avoid that room whenever possible.
So shortly after my job was ready, I wanted to pick it up and make the 300 meter walk twice.
Right at that moment, the student assistent walked in with a red face, madly screaming “who the hell printed this one inch stack of FORTRAN help”.I responded that I did. At first she (this was a time when we had a way better balanced female/male ratio in STEM) would not even want to give my output, refusing to believe I would read it.She also would not believe that you cour recursively send the help to a file, then print it. But the stack of paper demonstrated otherwise.I explained that I was going to read the whole stack. It took a long weekend, as after reading, I manually made the hand written table of contents on the front.
In addition, I colour marked the sides of the paper matching the entries in the table of contents.Now I could index into the right topics very quickly.
She was amazed I did all that in just a weekend. Apparently, that’s how my brain copes with information: need something, read something, read something, use something.
Later she actually made use of that stack of paper, as it was a great way for other people too to figure out some things faster than doing it on-line.Back to my side-business: that’s the reason for the PASCAL stack of paper. It’s the output of the VAX/VMS help for the PASCAL compiler. It was great and helped me learn a lot on the language.That print job took far less time: it was printed from RULCRI to the printer at the computing department. Their printer was not a dot-matrix one, line printer. It was orders of magnitude faster.
3 years later, I started doing more and more work with Turbo Pacscal and made the business my full time work.Only a decade later, I found out why I had deverted less and less energy into my studies and more into work.
Two reasons: computers are way easier to cope with than people, and a theoretical university was totally the wrong kind of environment for my learning mode: I am an auto-didactic person. I need to do things in order to learn.By now I have slowly learned way and way more about people. Coping with them is still tough, taking a lot of energy. But by now it is also a lot of fun. Though doing both at the same time is still very very hard for me.Finally back to the STRUCT print job:
That was actually the FORTRAN program I developed for the assignment.
You could choose from multiple problems to solve during the assignment.
As one of the few students, I managed to finish it in-time.
I was the only one that took this particular problem.
The essence is that you got a few tables with data:
- atom numbers, atom abbreviation and atom covalence (the number of other atoms they can bond with)
- bond pairs with abbreviations and minimum/maximum distance
- atom locations (abbreviation plus X/Y/Z coordinate)
The goal was to find which atoms were connected, and describe any cycles.Only after reading the tables, then trying to solve the problem, I found out a recursive solution was needed to solve it.
Boy was I surprised that FORTRAN did not support recursion.
In the end, I implemented my own recursion with stacks citing a Dire Straits song with “and when you finally reappear, at the place where you came in…”.A long story to explain I started printing on things to read very early on (:
/end
–jeroen
The Wiert Corner - irregular stream of stuff 