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Through the 1960s, hardware was terribly expensive
Machines were physically large and computationally small
"The late Professor Don Gillies at Illinois claimed to have written the first assembler. . . ."Gillies was a grad student of John Von Neumann, working on the IAS machine at Princeton. He was supposed to be working as a coder, translating programs written by more advanced researchers into machine code, but he found the job tedious, and wrote an assembler to help him do it faster.
"John Von Neumann's reaction was extremely negative. Gillies quotes his boss as having said 'We do not use a valuable scientific computing instrument to do clerical work!'"
(This was reported by Doug Jones of U. Iowa; Gillies was his thesis advisor)
(If true, it would have taken place around 1953)
The discipline of computer programming was forged in this environment
It gave us a hangover
We still think like this
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Copyright © 2003 M. J. Dominus |