Re: Low-level programming in Ada?

[Eryndlia Mavourneen <eryndlia@gmail.com>]

On Sunday, August 11, 2013 3:10:03 AM UTC-5, Simon Wright wrote:
> Mike H <postmaster@ada-augusta.demon.co.uk> writes:
> 
> . . . they don't make 'em
> > like that any more ;-) I cut my programming teeth on one of those and
> > have memories of being knee-deep in 5-channel punched paper tape ;-(
>     . . .

I only had one bout with paper tape, and that was when I was a student at the University of Tennessee.  The Physics Department had some old CDC machine with mag tapes.  The paper tape, as I recall, was the only boot device that was usable.

I ended up writing an assembler using SPITBOL on the University's IBM 360, which wrote a magnetic tape of the assembled program.  I then hand-carried that back to the Molecular Spectroscopy Lab and used a DEC PDP-11/20 (16K of 16-bit words of main storage) to punch the program to paper tape.  Then I could boot the program from the paper tape onto the CDC machine.  You can imagine my surprise, when the paper tape was read without error and the CDC booted!  LOL

-- Eryndlia (KK1T)