Bloody rubbish

[Joe Pfeiffer]

Skip Montanaro <skip.montanaro at gmail.com> writes:

>>
>> Machine language is so much simpler, and you can code with just a hexpad.
>>
>
> Pshaa... All you need are front panel switches. ;-) (Yes, I had a professor
> who required is to 'key' in our programs on the front panel, of a rack
> mounted PDP-11 as I recall. Needless to say, we didn't use an assembler
> either. We just wrote raw opcodes and their arguments on paper. This was in
> the late 70s.)

That's right about whn I had to do that for one assignment (on a Nova).
Hand-assembling, toggling in, and debugging a program on the front panel
was a valuable learning exercise.  Doing it a second time wouldn't have
been helpful...

One nice thing was the computer had core memory, and the students made
an agreement as to who got which part.  You could work for a while, shut
the machine down, come back the next day, power it up, and your program
would still be there.