About programing, a general question

[Joep L. Blom]

On 18/12/10 10:04, Colin Law wrote:
> On 17 December 2010 23:00, Joep L. Blom<jlblom at neuroweave.nl>  wrote:
>>
>> I agree with Kipton Moravec that ALGOL was a much better language but
>> that is understandable. FORTRAN was developed by engineers, ALGOL by
>> mathematicians. C is also developed by engineers (I rest my case: no
>> offence to engineers!!).
>> I differ a little with those advocates of C++ as implementation of OOP.
>> If you compare it with the implementation in PASCAL (look at Linux fpc)
>> you'll see that the implementation is much cleaner and better
>> implemented. But it is as with Windows: if the basic concept isn't sound
>> ( and that goes for C) than everything you build on that is flawed as
>> well. I hope I haven't insulted many people but it is my opinion ( and I
>> started programming with ALGOL in 1963).
>
> On what machine as a matter of interest?  Mine was an Elliott 803 with
> the equivalent of 32KB RAM in about 1967 at Lucas in Birmingham,
> England.
>
> Colin
>
COlin,
That was on the Electrologica X1 and later the X8.
They were machines build by a small Dutch company which later is sold to 
Philips (then it was called Philips Electrologica). Several were sold in 
the Netherlands but I don't know if they were sold abroad. They were 
rather advanced machines build with the input from people like Edzge 
Dijkstra (who was one of the developers of ALGOL) and others. I worked 
on it from 1965 to 1969. I cannot remember the amount of memory. I know 
the X1 had a low memory count. I used that one for making graphic plots 
(curves of firing frequencies of neurons) where we used a curve-fitting 
routine to match a theoretical models. It took approx.20 minutes for 1 
plot so I interspersed the program I did it with with funny texts for 
the operators after several plots (to get preference in processing!); it 
worked.
On the X8 I programmed more elaborate statistics and theoretical models 
but that machine was many times faster that the X1.
You can find information on these computers here:> 
http://www.science.uva.nl/faculteit/museum/X1.html

Joep