Bloody rubbish

[Avi Gross]

Actually, Joe, putting in any serious program using toggle switches without
anything like a BACKSPACE was very hard as I often had to abort and start
again. Doing it twice the same way, Argh!!!!!!!!!!!!

Luckily, I only had to do it a few times to learn just like I had to write
assembler programs or feed in programs from paper tape or from punch cards.
Most of us have moved on stage by stage and now tools like Python or
libraries and modules often at higher levels are more the norm. 

Can you imagine taking any modern program in digital form as zeroes and ones
and entering it by hand? Some are huge and especially if anything like
shared libraries also has to be keyed in.

But reminiscing is getting away from the point of expressing our sarcasm
about one of the people that makes us want to segregate this forum as one
way to not get into silly discussions like this!

-----Original Message-----
From: Python-list <python-list-bounces+avigross=verizon.net at python.org> On
Behalf Of Joe Pfeiffer
Sent: Thursday, May 6, 2021 3:03 PM
To: python-list at python.org
Subject: Re: Bloody rubbish

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.
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