I continue to turn up the most interesting things...

[jducoeur]

Going through all the books has turned up a lot of interesting reading matter, but it's also turned up the occasional surprise that just happened to be sitting on the bookshelves. Possibly the most surprising is material indicating that Jane's mother Catherine had learned how to use a computer -- in 1959.

She never made the slightest reference to it -- indeed, I never saw her use a modern computer, although I think it likely she knew word-processing -- but the materials seem clear. I found a telegram, inviting her (back in her assistant-professor days) to take a course on programming a Univac the week of August 31st, 1959. And elsewhere on the bookcase, I found a ton of related materials: a Univac manual, notes, and a thing that looks vaguely like a circular slide rule whose use I am entirely unclear on. I assume we inherited it when she died ten years ago, and Jane never got around to filing any of it.

Very neat stuff, although once again I find myself wishing there was *someone* left from the family that I could ask about this...

Comments

[jducoeur]

... it does support that theory, yes. And reminds me to be grateful that I am working in a relative golden age of programming...

Re the circular slide rule

[dave waks (from livejournal.com)]

On a drum-based computer, the execution speed of programs depends greatly on the sequence of instructions on the drum. I don't know the coding for the Univac II, but on the IBM 650 - the first computer I write code for - each instruction had two operands. The first was the address of the data for that instruction, the second was the address ofthe next instruction.

The easiest way to write code was to put the instructions in sequential order - but since the drum spun past two or three memory slots during the typical instruction, that resulted in nearly the slowest execution time, since the drum would have to spin an entire time around before it got to the next instruction.

IBM provided an assembly program called SOAP -the "Symbolic Optimum Assembly Program" - which optimized the location of instructions. As a freshman at Cornell in the spring of 1958, I convinced the Cornell COmputing Center to adopt SOAP and wired the board for it.

Dad