About programing, a general question

[Colin Law]

On 18 December 2010 11:23, Joep L. Blom <jlblom at neuroweave.nl> wrote:
> 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

Happy days!

Colin