Re: Ada on punched cards?

["Randy Brukardt" <randy@rrsoftware.com>]

Stephen Leake wrote in message ...
>"Randy Brukardt" <randy@rrsoftware.com> writes:
>
>> The very first version of Janus/Ada was created as the homework for
the
>> compiler construction course (CS 701) at the University of Wisconsin.
>> The host machine was a Univac 1100/80. While we did most of the work
at
>> the recently installed terminals, we did do some things on punched
>> cards. (The machine "charged" for each run, and batch runs were
>> "cheaper", so we could stretch out our "funds" by using cards.) The
>> coding was in an extended Pascal (which we later machine-translated
to
>> Ada). But of course the test programs were written in Ada, and we
often
>> ran test batches on cards. So, I suppose the answer is yes, but there
>> never were any real programs on the cards. And in any case, there was
an
>> early Ada compiler on cards...
>
>Cool. What year was this?


Fall of 1980. The first commercial version of Janus/Ada shipped in
November 1981. In those days, all you had to do was to write something,
take out an advertisement in Byte or Dr. Dobbs, and cash the checks.
People were happy to find anything that worked that they could get their
hands on. Sort of like the Dot Com boom...(without the Venture
Capitalists and Wall Street).

>Maybe this could go in a "history of Ada" page at AdaIC?


Perhaps. I wonder if anyone is interested (and I doubt that discussing
things that happened 20+ years ago would help getting Ada used more...)

         Randy.