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Re: [Poll] Computing favorities

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Michael Black <et472@ncf.ca> writes:

> On Tue, 25 Aug 2015, Rich Alderson wrote:

>> He wrote code for a living working for Bonneville Power Administration (you
>> know, the people who run the Hoover Dam?) while he was still in high school;

> Swiftwater Bill didn't write code for the great Grand Coulee dam?  That 
> seems more fitting, since he was from Seattle.

Sorry.  At some point years ago I got the impression that "Hoover" was a
renaming of the Grand Coulee Dam.  BPA has nought to do with Hoover Dam, I
think.

> He did some stuff, but he was in high school, so he got to "test" 
> software, and had some business to make machines to measure traffic (but I 
> can't remember if that actually put out a product).  Then he was off to 
> Harvard, maybe a bit younger than many, where soon the Altair 8800 
> appeared on the cover of Popular Electronics, and they made their bid to 
> write a BASIC for it.

Both WHG and PGA learned BASIC on a GE Information Systems hookup (that is,
real Dartmouth BASIC, commercialized by General Electric, on whose hardware it
originated).  Then they were introduced to a startup service bureau in Seattle
(Computer Center Corporation, affectionately know as C-cubed) which used a
PDP-10 as the compute engine.[1] This was where they learned assembler
programming, debugger and operating system internals, and all the things
necessary for a successful career in the computer industry.

Traf-O-Data was post high school.  PGA thought the 8008 (NB!) was a good basis
for a side-of-the-road traffic counter, and wrote a simulator in PDP-10
assembler for the processor.  This was the tool with which the two of them
developed software for the hardware they commissioned someone else to build.
The device was a commercial failure.

When the 8080 came out, PGA thought it was a great candidate for BASIC; WHG
didn't want to write one for a processor that no one was using yet.  The Altair
was the turning point.  PGA revised his 8008 simulator to handle 8080 machine
code, and they were off to the races.

                                                                Rich

[1] Principals included Steve Russell of MIT AI Lab and Dick Gruen of SAIL,
    both of which were hotbeds of PDP-10 usage.

-- 
Rich Alderson                                   news@alderson.users.panix.com
    the russet leaves of an autumn oak/inspire once again the failed poet/
    to take up his pen/and essay to place his meagre words upon the page...

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Re: [Poll] Computing favorities Michael Black <et472@ncf.ca> - 2015-08-25 16:24 -0400
  Re: [Poll] Computing favorities Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> - 2015-08-25 13:36 -0700
    Re: [Poll] Computing favorities Peter Flass <peter_flass@yahoo.com> - 2015-08-25 20:40 +0000
      Re: [Poll] Computing favorities Michael Black <et472@ncf.ca> - 2015-08-26 02:07 -0400
        Re: [Poll] Computing favorities Rich Alderson <news@alderson.users.panix.com> - 2015-08-31 20:31 -0400
          Re: [Poll] Computing favorities Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> - 2015-08-31 18:04 -0700
            Re: [Poll] Computing favorities "Bill Cunningham" <nospam@nspam.invalid> - 2015-09-03 16:20 -0400
    Re: [Poll] Computing favorities Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> - 2015-08-25 16:01 -0700
    Re: [Poll] Computing favorities Michael Black <et472@ncf.ca> - 2015-08-26 02:04 -0400
  Re: [Poll] Computing favorities Rich Alderson <news@alderson.users.panix.com> - 2015-08-31 20:23 -0400

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