Juergen Braukmann <juergen.braukmann@ruhr-west.de> writes:

"James (Jim) Hatridge" wrote:

...

...

I started with PL/I and assembler with punch cards on an IBM 360, then moved to Fortran on CDC machines (anyone remembers Control Data?), from

sure I do! We had CDC machines for ages. Good old NOS and later NOS/VE.

Oh! Younger CDC's :-). Who remembers SCOPE and KRONOS? :-) Who worked with paper tape systems? Drums? With sound-memory within mercury? :-) (I'm a bit dishonest about the last two. I only heard of them...) A single 686 box running SuSE is _infinitely_ more interesting, if we consider the available features, than any of the machines above. The drawback is that no one could claim knowing all software packaged by SuSE, say, inside out, nor having read sources for all of them. Yet, It was possible to do so with the older machines: one could get a reasonable grasp of the whole process from the deadstart process through the compilation. We used to have _everything_ printed out, all written in assembler (the only really reliable language). NOS/VE came much later, and was much less interesting, as full sources were not distributed anymore. -- François Pinard http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~pinard -- To unsubscribe send e-mail to suse-linux-e-unsubscribe@suse.com For additional commands send e-mail to suse-linux-e-help@suse.com Also check the FAQ at http://www.suse.com/Support/Doku/FAQ/