Re: Is Programming Obsolete?

On Mon, 13 May 2024 13:10:35 +0000, Scott Dorsey wrote:

Bob Eager  <news0009@eager.cx> wrote:

>
Indeed. When I was doing my Master's, I saw undergraduates being taught
using a 'paper computer'. 16 words of RAM, 12 bit word. It was a set of
boxes with index cards with contents written on them. Plus a couple of
boxes for accumulator and flags. It was ctually a PDP-8 clone, but only
for simplicity.

 
Bell Labs used to sell a paper card thing called the CARDIAC which was
vaguely like this, and the US Army training folks had a thing called
TAGSAC which was a paper computer for teaching programming in the days
when computers were too expensive to waste on students.
 
But these days you can buy an ST evaluation board that plugs into your
PC and has a marvelous 8-bit instruction set.  It even has a divide!
Take that,
8051.

The great thing about the one with index cards is that it came out of the
stationery budget!



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Using UNIX since v6 (1975)...

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