B
Bill Sloman
Guest
On Friday, February 7, 2020 at 12:49:35 PM UTC+11, Rick C wrote:
Lots of people I knew when I was a graduate students - 1963 to 1970 - when there weren't any home computers, were well aware that computers could be programmed to crunch their data, and learned FORTRAN to do it.
I spent quite a bit of time debugging their FORTRAN programs (which wasn't all that time-consuming or difficult). It took me a week to learn FORTRAN - it's not all that difficult. I did get more competent with it over the next year - it's not all that user-friendly - and it was that experience that let me help other people.
Exposing kiddies to home computers and trivial programming is educational, but it wasn't what drove the use of computers. They were very useful in a lot of applications, and while it took pioneers (of which I was one) to expose new applications, the rest of the world latched on very quickly.
My father's paper mill went in for computer control remarkably early - using a Ferranti Argus 400
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferranti_Argus
My father had certainly got the idea of what computers could do from me, amongst others, but the advantages were pretty obvious if you thought about the matter at all.
IBM had tried to install computer control on a paper mill in America a year or two earlier (which my faterh had known about), and had made a complete hash of it. When the word got out that Associated Pulp and Paper Mills were planning to try it, the local branch of IBM made a heavy pitch for the job, but my father was not impressed.
What sold the idea to my father was computer control of his counter-current continuous digester, where the time constants were too long for analog control.
It worked a treat for a few years, but the computer control of the paper machines saved a lot more money, so the continuous digester went back to manual control. Of course the operators, who had spent a few years seeing how the computer did it, did a much better job than they had used to.
--
Bill Sloman, Sydney
Lots of people I knew when I was a graduate students - 1963 to 1970 - when there weren't any home computers, were well aware that computers could be programmed to crunch their data, and learned FORTRAN to do it.
I spent quite a bit of time debugging their FORTRAN programs (which wasn't all that time-consuming or difficult). It took me a week to learn FORTRAN - it's not all that difficult. I did get more competent with it over the next year - it's not all that user-friendly - and it was that experience that let me help other people.
Exposing kiddies to home computers and trivial programming is educational, but it wasn't what drove the use of computers. They were very useful in a lot of applications, and while it took pioneers (of which I was one) to expose new applications, the rest of the world latched on very quickly.
My father's paper mill went in for computer control remarkably early - using a Ferranti Argus 400
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferranti_Argus
My father had certainly got the idea of what computers could do from me, amongst others, but the advantages were pretty obvious if you thought about the matter at all.
IBM had tried to install computer control on a paper mill in America a year or two earlier (which my faterh had known about), and had made a complete hash of it. When the word got out that Associated Pulp and Paper Mills were planning to try it, the local branch of IBM made a heavy pitch for the job, but my father was not impressed.
What sold the idea to my father was computer control of his counter-current continuous digester, where the time constants were too long for analog control.
It worked a treat for a few years, but the computer control of the paper machines saved a lot more money, so the continuous digester went back to manual control. Of course the operators, who had spent a few years seeing how the computer did it, did a much better job than they had used to.
--
Bill Sloman, Sydney