Watching these in 2022 is so cool. They show a tool in this video that converts a screen layout into the COBOL Data Division statements to generate that screen. I created a program around 1986 that did the same thing. I think it was written in Turbo Pascal. I called it Taurus. I know nobody cares... it's just so fun reminiscing about this stuff.
Gary and Stuart were both excellent hosts. You can tell Gary was a brilliant man, yet never talked down or tried to belittle any of his guests. Excellent show
Trivia: - Who is the officially recognized (by the IEEE) inventor of operating systems for the personal computers (first OS for microprocessors) - Who is the officially recognized inventor (by the IEEE) of the BIOS ( and thus the open architecture for the basis of the IBM PC). - Who is the officially recognized inventor (by the IEEE) of the first programming language for microprocessors? - Who actually produced the first GUI(windows) for IBM PC computers? - Who produced the first multitasking OS for IBM PC computer? ..etc....etc.. The answers: 1) Gary Kidall: CP/M operating system, which was later "reversed engineered" and ended up being sold as "MSDOS 2) Gary Kidall: Gary Kildall invented the BIOS, which the basis of the architecture of the orginal IBM PC(which really was a modified S-100 bus computer). 3) Gary Kildall: the first language for microprocessors was Gary Kikldall's PL/1 4) Surprisingly Gary Kildall again: GEM GUI for IBM PC came out before Windows 1.0. In fact it could be argued that Windows was a copy of GEM, not macintosh, as GEM ran on top of CP/M like windows ran on top of MS-DOS(a CP/M clone) 5) Gary Kildall: Gary's Digital Research came out with MP/M a fully multitasking preemptive OS, probably about 10 years before microsoft had a multitasking OS. And this is just the start of Gary's pioneering list... ...I have to laugh at myself when I think, "what was going on in Gary's head seeing all these guests come on, while the show mostly ignored his achievements".
The legendary Gary Kildall in full flow in this episode, wonderful to hear him talk. Such a shame he is not here to witness his deserved credit as one of the pioneers of all we enjoy today.
@@hansneusidler7988 well he tried to have his cake and eat it to he wanted everyone to have cpm that wanted it but he also wanted to charge for it to much had he known that computers were going to explode he could have dropped cpm prices and stayed in the ring but he didn't
As I understand it, the FILL command was written in assembly. But as a Forth programmer, you can then use the FILL command, no assembly language at all. When you use any kind of high level language, your commands get translated to machine code too. So not much of a catch. The great thing about Forth is, that if you do know assembly, you can create your own high level commands and expand the Forth language to your own requirements.
She alluded to this in the intro - that you can toss in assembly code where it’s needed to give the power of low level programming to a higher level language. C does the same, and it’s vital to its applicability I think.
@@ArumesYT Yep! The OP seems to miss the point of "FORTH". It's Not at all a "gotcha". Hell, people have included assembly language routines in friggin' GW-BASIC!
I think is a good catch. Similar to this you can use C for programming and then optimize some functions calling assembly. If all program was in Forth, that demo would run slow.
Friggin love Gary. FORTH CEO: See how fast our flood fill is? Gary: mmhmm, mmhmm, now is this all in FORTH or is some of it in assembly? FORTH CEO: Well, I mean the speedup is all from assembly optimization, mostly the exact part I'm trying to show off...
it seems the early shows were educational in nature - brilliant. they then moved on to the hardware and grew with their viewers excellent show. - a true classic
Then in the mid to late 90's again (sadly) moving with the times it got less to do with actual computing and programming and more to do with multi-media stuff which made the show shit and eventually killed it.
@@rooneye and in my opinion the host (not gary) would rush people to speak about their wares in like 30 seconds before he moved on to the other person. just gave me anxiety watching it! these earlier ones im seeing are vastly superior.
We can run Apple ][ BASIC, Sinclair BASIC,TRS-80 BASIC,TI-BASIC, Commodore BASIC and IBM-PC BASIC programs on one PC (all at once if we want to..) thanks to emulators and VMs! What cool shit we have today! would have been mind blowing in 1994 let alone 1984!
Those are most likely buckling spring keyboards, they're not common today (although surely you can still purchase one ofc), but back in the day they were essentially the norm.
This was just a couple of years before C++ (and later other object oriented programming languages) had a great breakthrough. In fact, C++ was released in 1985; a year after this episode was aired(but it took a couple of years to be more commonly used).
+Mariusz Pluciński C is still a very low level language that requires a LOT of typing and teaching the computer every nuance of the algorithm. I like to see a language I can simply talk to in plain English. Like StarTrek. C is a keyboard text language. Don't even need a mouse. Heck I use VIM most of the time.
+AirScholar You can think of the voice activated Star Trek computer as basically an advanced version of Google. Not really suitable for programming, unless your notion of "programming" is just to find something from the Internet and copy it.
thought2007 Wrong ... A problem can be asked of the computer and it will dynamically create the algorithm to solve it, if it can. It isn't just looing stuff up like Google.
@@livesimplyandhumbly I agree here. I did a lot of programming as a kid, but at some point it just gets boring, tedious, too repetitive. It's like being an architect and having to build your own designs brick by brick. But if you switch to high level languages to speed up that process, you sacrifice a lot of computing power. So it would be great if the computer itself could figure out an efficient algorithm to fit your programming needs. We're getting there, we all know the famous example of C compilers writing better assembly than assembly programmers, but we still have a long way to go as well.
And today, almost nobody knows COBOL, but we need COBOL programmers again to update the old mainframes many states' unemployment systems still run on, overwhelmed with unprecedented demand caused by the Coronavirus.
You still have those old ones? Jesus, seems in some regards US is just a third world country. Should´nt be suprised by the "president" you have. I still had cobol in university 20 years ago. Even then it was already old and obsolete
I think many banks still use many COBOL programs. The reason is simple: They didn't dare to change something that was doing it's job and doing it correctly. Now it's time to upgrade and COBOL programmers can make a fortune if they come back out of retirement.
Man, this show looks ancient and yet, I was 16 when this aired. Weird idea. I went from Logo and Turtle to Pascal, to Basic, 6510 assembler, C++, ASP, Javascript, Perl, ASP.NET, Java, Python, C#, Objective C, and Swift. A programming language is just a tool and those tools have come a long way..
Me born in 1989, in India: Logo to GW Basic to Java (Blue J editor from Monash University Denmark) in class 10 to C++ in class 11/12 to C in Engineering 1st year Basic computing paper to machine level/assembly level code in 3rd year of engineering in Microprocessor paper to HTML CSS Javascript Ajax JSP SQL in my first job. 😅 And now I write codes in Python for AI/ML.
And some of the languages mentioned were quite old by then. FORTRAN 1957, COBOL 1969 and BASIC 1964! amazingly 50 & 60 years later, some form of all three still exist. in fact with Dos Box you can get the MS versions to run on a phone!
BASIC was included in literally every home computer sold in the 1980s, and it also acted as the user interface and operating system to the whole computer. Basically everybody knew at least some BASIC statements...
I wish today's computer lessons were this detailed and clear. Now a days I think in my opinion everyone explianing/teching anything computer tech focus too much to dumb things down and short cuts we miss why and how things really work.
Hell yes. We have insane access to total information and our society is stupider than ever. It's really a case of zero attention span and loud hip hop creeping into everything. ADHD society.
Yikes. Please don't try to learn about computing from these. The Computer Chronicles episodes are a *very* high-level first pass at the topic, and the reason that they seem so clear is that they simplify things to an extreme degree in order to fit everything into the half-hour infotainment format.
@@HardCase1911 Blaming "loud hip hop" for a lack of intellectual curiosity is probably top 10 for me in terms of most boomer things I've ever read in my life
Since they were on PBS, they didn't have to cater to people with tiny attention spans, and they only had to beg people to like and subscribe during pledge breaks
Somehow I think that this COBOL guy doesn't really know what's talking about. Granted I don't know COBOL either but I'm not on TV. Gary Kildall had such a direct way of asking very pointed technical questions that it makes all the gaps show. Love this show.
09:15 “Data-handling” and “file-manipulating” firmly built around the concepts of fixed-length fields and records, and ISAM files. These days “data-handling” and “file-manipulation” are more descriptive of what you might do in Perl or Python. They mainly involve free-format lines and text-heavy data, where you have to recognize patterns and delimiters rather than count columns.
I have worked with a number of programming languages on my Atari and Windows/Pentium computers. The languages that I am most familiar with are Action, Assembler/Editor, BASIC, COBOL, Logo, Pascal & Pilot.
Yes. "C" has been around since 1972! More Amazing than that: "Fortran" is STILL around. Fortran has been with us since 1957!!! COBOL is also still around, and it's from 1960!
@@josephf.2787 Yep! "BASIC" is still around too! I can't really name a high (or "mid") level language that's actually "dead". There may be a bit of "assembly" languages that are no longer used because the HARDWARE is no longer in use, But every language HIGHER than that has code running somewhere.
Photoshop v1.0 Mac was programmed in Pascal, the source code of this version has been published years ago and can be downloaded legally here is the legal link to it: computerhistory.org/blog/adobe-photoshop-source-code/
40 years later and the entire computing industry has standardized around C and its curly-braced descendants (C++, C#., Objective-C, Java, JavaScript, Python, Go, Rust, etc.) and all the languages featured on the show have fallen by the wayside, except COBOL, which still runs 95% of the world's banking transactions despite nobody actually knowing how to program in it anymore. Paul O'Grady really dropped the ball in making COBOL more palatable to the masses.
16:37 “Business applications” which nowadays involve access to SQL databases, for example. Which means having good string facilities for dynamically generating SQL statements. Which COBOL is lousy at.
But one of the key points about COBOL was its portability between completely different machines from completely different manufacturers. So all that goes out the window once SQL comes in?
@@lawrencedoliveiro9104 But that's only true up to the standard. Vendors would happily add their own extensions if they thought it would give them a competitive advantage.
COBOL was already decades old when SQL became a thing. The applications that were built in COBOL and used its native, standard data access -- multiple flat files with fixed record lengths -- didn't suddenly stop working when SQL came out. Matter of fact, SQL wasn't really a business *requirement* until the 90s and those applications needed to be maintained in the 90s and beyond because you can't just "lift and shift" a COBOL application into an SQL database and expect everything to work. COBOL is lousy at many things, but it's excellent within its niche, which is still a place modern solutions based on e.g. SQL and Java can't touch because of the environment it runs in.
No he didn't. In her intro she said it incorporates aspects of machine language. He was highlighting a feature to the audience in that you can also use low level language in Forth.
hehe BUT if you learn COBOL today you can make SHIT LOADS of cash. Because banks still use the fuck out of it. Pretty much all transactions in banks and ATMs use it. The old programmers who've retired are making fuck tonnes of cash coming back to do EASY (to them) small jobs for loads of money because no one is learning COBOL no more so there aren't any programmers around.
Meanwhile high-level programming requires years of education and writing extremely old fashioned complex syntax while the opposite should have happened... A child should actually be able to do it. I can understand top notch stuff such as AI is something different but come on..., even the simplest change for a user in integrated software requires a high-specialist and tons of time (cost). This by now should have been solved years ago.
진짜 저 당시에는 컴퓨터 엔지니어, 프로그래머들의 인상착의(ㅋㅋ)는 거의 대부분 대머리에 두꺼운 돋보기 안경을 낀 존나 클래식한 정장... 내가 95년부터 프로그래머로 근무했는데 Cobol Programmer로 재직할때 대머리가 거의 반반... 나도 대머리...ㅠㅠ 컴터에서 나오는 전자파가 당시에는 완벽하게 차폐되지 않은듯... 되게 웃긴게 결혼한 선배들은 거의 대부분 딸...딸...딸내미들 투성이... 당시에는 아들을 못낳으면 씨받이라도 들이는 풍조였는데... 지금은 딸바보 아빠들이 더 인정(?)받는 희한한 세상이 되었네...ㅋㅋㅋ 코볼 프로그램 디버깅할때 신택스 에러가 4~500개씩 발생하면 대부분 그걸 처리하는데 몇일이 걸리는 넘들도 많았는데... 그걸 10분도 안걸려서 해결하면 다들 '코볼신'으로 추켜세웠던게 기억남.... 로직에러는 잡기 어렵지만 신택스 에러는 겜하듯 아무것도 아닌것인데... 바부들... 지금은 다들 뭐하냐? 전산실에서 막강한 항온항습기의 위력에 한여름에도 오들오들 떨면서 근무하던 프로그래머들... 다들 잘있재?? 옛날에 매킨토시 클래식 만지작거리면서 너무 황홀해했던게 그립다... 옛날이 그리워~ (50대 아재 프로그래머)
5:37 omg who does that guy look like? He looks so familiar! He reminds me of someone so much, but I can't quite put my finger on it. lol he totally failed at the end and choked and didn't show the end of his presentation because he fucked something up 🤣 with "Finger trouble" EDIT: Micheal Sheen! That's who he reminds me of.
"undue partiality or attachment to a group or place to which one belongs or has belonged" It's a less common meaning of the word, but it's in the dictionary.
Back then, even early MS-DOS wasn't programmed in C. Microsoft used assembler in the early days. The compilers weren't that sophisticated and available memory was low. But Microsoft has used C extensively for WinNT.
LOGO... I wish my teachers did *know* how to programme in it so that I wouldn't fail my computer exams for 3 damn years. Thank you, for you have inspired my interest in computer programming by not teaching me how to do so! See what kind of monster you have converted me into: sum←{C←⍕√⍵+0v ⋄ (⍎1↑C) + +/{⍎⍵}¨99↑2↓⍕√⍵+0v} ⋄ +/∊{sum ⍵}¨N~(N←⍳100)*2
Not much has changed. People still invent new languages everyday and there are too many to choose from. It’s probably worse today really. We have factions these days
It's still in use today! en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forth_(programming_language) Quote: "Forth is used in the Open Firmware boot loader, in space applications such as the Philae spacecraft, and in other embedded systems which involve interaction with hardware." I really didn't expect that.
Wow... 3 levels of language and the examples was totally off, even for back then. Machine language/Assembler could be considered the same level, and the lowest level. Then structured languages, like C, Pascal or Fortran, etc... Lastly, macro (and today scripting) languages.
Cheifet: "Hey, Gary, next week's show is on programming languages. Why don't you demonstrate CP/M a little." Gary: "I think I'd rather talk about logo." Cheifet: "Come on, CP/M, that's your baby. Why don't you..." Gary: "I SAID I'LL TALK ABOUT LOGO, OK???OK!!!!"
Watching these in 2022 is so cool. They show a tool in this video that converts a screen layout into the COBOL Data Division statements to generate that screen. I created a program around 1986 that did the same thing. I think it was written in Turbo Pascal. I called it Taurus. I know nobody cares... it's just so fun reminiscing about this stuff.
Turbo Pascal was a great language - plenty to reminisce about!
@@superscatboy Learned Pascal on the VAX
@@oldtwinsna8347 Damn, you certainly pre-date me!
So you used TP to be more productive in Cobol? That's actually interesting.
I think Bell Atantic used that on their mainframes in 1999. I think it was called Talon. It wrote COBOL. Some of it well, some not....
Gary and Stuart were both excellent hosts. You can tell Gary was a brilliant man, yet never talked down or tried to belittle any of his guests. Excellent show
Concurrent DOS is what IBM XTs *SHOULD* have shipped with. Way superior to MSDOS. Gary should have been the billionaire.
definitely, these nerds had class back in the day. nothing like the geniuses that stack overflow is polluted with
Woz, Kildall and Jay Miner are the under appreciated legends of this period.
@@superslayerguy Yeah, StackOverflow is a shithole of pricks.
@@rabidbigdog And Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson. :)
These old shows are perfect for background sound while working. Interesting and educational but not distracting like modern shows.
I play it on my tablet as something to fall asleep to
I draw with it playing.
I listen to the computer chronicles as a podcast
And the theme music is wonderful!
That’s what I have been doing and it’s actually increased my productivity expect at this moment while I write this comment.
Trivia:
- Who is the officially recognized (by the IEEE) inventor of operating systems for the personal computers (first OS for microprocessors)
- Who is the officially recognized inventor (by the IEEE) of the BIOS ( and thus the open architecture for the basis of the IBM PC).
- Who is the officially recognized inventor (by the IEEE) of the first programming language for microprocessors?
- Who actually produced the first GUI(windows) for IBM PC computers?
- Who produced the first multitasking OS for IBM PC computer?
..etc....etc..
The answers:
1) Gary Kidall: CP/M operating system, which was later "reversed engineered" and ended up being sold as "MSDOS
2) Gary Kidall: Gary Kildall invented the BIOS, which the basis of the architecture of the orginal IBM PC(which really was a modified S-100 bus computer).
3) Gary Kildall: the first language for microprocessors was Gary Kikldall's PL/1
4) Surprisingly Gary Kildall again: GEM GUI for IBM PC came out before Windows 1.0. In fact it could be argued that Windows was a copy of GEM, not macintosh, as GEM ran on top of CP/M like windows ran on top of MS-DOS(a CP/M clone)
5) Gary Kildall: Gary's Digital Research came out with MP/M a fully multitasking preemptive OS, probably about 10 years before microsoft had a multitasking OS.
And this is just the start of Gary's pioneering list...
...I have to laugh at myself when I think, "what was going on in Gary's head seeing all these guests come on, while the show mostly ignored his achievements".
Gary was such a humble and nice man :( it's depressing that he died so young
The legendary Gary Kildall in full flow in this episode, wonderful to hear him talk. Such a shame he is not here to witness his deserved credit as one of the pioneers of all we enjoy today.
But He missed bis Chance, and Billy gates took it away From him
@@hansneusidler7988 it's ok he's dead now
@@raven4k998
Sad, thats true, but doesnt Change the fact, that he has missed His opportunity.
@@hansneusidler7988 well he tried to have his cake and eat it to he wanted everyone to have cpm that wanted it but he also wanted to charge for it to much had he known that computers were going to explode he could have dropped cpm prices and stayed in the ring but he didn't
@@raven4k998 Greed eats brains.
Also, good job on Gary catching the FORTH rep using assembly to optimize her demo, rather than leaning on the language fully.
As I understand it, the FILL command was written in assembly. But as a Forth programmer, you can then use the FILL command, no assembly language at all. When you use any kind of high level language, your commands get translated to machine code too. So not much of a catch. The great thing about Forth is, that if you do know assembly, you can create your own high level commands and expand the Forth language to your own requirements.
She alluded to this in the intro - that you can toss in assembly code where it’s needed to give the power of low level programming to a higher level language. C does the same, and it’s vital to its applicability I think.
The ENTIRE point of "FORTH" was to go as "low level" or "high level" as needed. It's not a "gotcha" at all. SMH.
@@ArumesYT Yep! The OP seems to miss the point of "FORTH". It's Not at all a "gotcha". Hell, people have included assembly language routines in friggin' GW-BASIC!
I think is a good catch. Similar to this you can use C for programming and then optimize some functions calling assembly. If all program was in Forth, that demo would run slow.
Did a search and J. David Eisenberg is still out teaching computer science to this day! Even has his own youtube channel.
no
Yes.
Friggin love Gary.
FORTH CEO: See how fast our flood fill is?
Gary: mmhmm, mmhmm, now is this all in FORTH or is some of it in assembly?
FORTH CEO: Well, I mean the speedup is all from assembly optimization, mostly the exact part I'm trying to show off...
Roasted.
Don´t BS me, gal, I´m Gary Kindall.
it seems the early shows were educational in nature - brilliant.
they then moved on to the hardware and grew with their viewers
excellent show. - a true classic
They integrated education and high-level discussion/analysis seamlessly.
Then in the mid to late 90's again (sadly) moving with the times it got less to do with actual computing and programming and more to do with multi-media stuff which made the show shit and eventually killed it.
@@rooneye and in my opinion the host (not gary) would rush people to speak about their wares in like 30 seconds before he moved on to the other person. just gave me anxiety watching it! these earlier ones im seeing are vastly superior.
"Our THIRD guest is going to talk about FORTH!" Ha-ha! A sequential numbers joke! X) I love how nerdy this show is, I so wish I watched it as a kid.
You would have been bored af as a kid. lol
It's a good thing he didn't have have STEP 2 in his code, LOL.
I'm glad he didn't plead the fifth. :)
true@@rooneye
We can run Apple ][ BASIC, Sinclair BASIC,TRS-80 BASIC,TI-BASIC, Commodore BASIC and IBM-PC BASIC programs on one PC (all at once if we want to..) thanks to emulators and VMs! What cool shit we have today! would have been mind blowing in 1994 let alone 1984!
Love those clicky keyboards
Those are most likely buckling spring keyboards, they're not common today (although surely you can still purchase one ofc), but back in the day they were essentially the norm.
The format and layout of CC was fantastic, youreally do not see this on TV today and the Ladies in the 70s and 80s were so classy :)
I clicked through all videos in this channel to make sure I liked every single one of them.
This was just a couple of years before C++ (and later other object oriented programming languages) had a great breakthrough.
In fact, C++ was released in 1985; a year after this episode was aired(but it took a couple of years to be more commonly used).
thats why a modern computer has troubles running windows 95 or 98 if you try to install them
@@raven4k998 Can you explain that further?
ALGO68 had OOP and SmallTalk (1974?) was the mother of it all
@@johnsmith1953x I think Simula was the first OOP language in the mid 60:s.
But none of them got anywhere near the spread of C++.
@@raven4k998I can be we🎉
It is very interesting to hear how the programming languages world has looked, just before amazing spread of C language and it's descendants
+Mariusz Pluciński
C is still a very low level language that requires a LOT of typing and teaching the computer every nuance of the algorithm.
I like to see a language I can simply talk to in plain English. Like StarTrek.
C is a keyboard text language. Don't even need a mouse.
Heck I use VIM most of the time.
+AirScholar You can think of the voice activated Star Trek computer as basically an advanced version of Google. Not really suitable for programming, unless your notion of "programming" is just to find something from the Internet and copy it.
thought2007
Wrong ... A problem can be asked of the computer and it will dynamically create the algorithm to solve it, if it can.
It isn't just looing stuff up like Google.
@@livesimplyandhumbly I agree here. I did a lot of programming as a kid, but at some point it just gets boring, tedious, too repetitive. It's like being an architect and having to build your own designs brick by brick. But if you switch to high level languages to speed up that process, you sacrifice a lot of computing power. So it would be great if the computer itself could figure out an efficient algorithm to fit your programming needs. We're getting there, we all know the famous example of C compilers writing better assembly than assembly programmers, but we still have a long way to go as well.
C and Unix go hand in hand, so the micro computer and IBM mainframe world would have their own dominant languages. So, Fortran, Forth, PILOT, PL/M
The computer Chronicles... yeah baby, I loved this show when i was a kid.
the Cobol guy looks like the perfect bond villain
He just needs a white Persian cat
And sounds like one too!
"Are there any new languages on the horizon, or are there a finite number now?"
If only you knew, dude... If only you knew.
In my TRS-80 days, I called BASIC "Poor Man's FORTRAN", LOL.
And today, almost nobody knows COBOL, but we need COBOL programmers again to update the old mainframes many states' unemployment systems still run on, overwhelmed with unprecedented demand caused by the Coronavirus.
You still have those old ones? Jesus, seems in some regards US is just a third world country. Should´nt be suprised by the "president" you have. I still had cobol in university 20 years ago. Even then it was already old and obsolete
@ungratefulmetalpansy
So, because the US invented so much it still has to use the oldest technology? Does not sound plausible to me
@ungratefulmetalpansy I see, So Boeing still has the 737 MAX because it works? No, it is a shitty plane. Too old airframe pushed to far
I think many banks still use many COBOL programs. The reason is simple: They didn't dare to change something that was doing it's job and doing it correctly. Now it's time to upgrade and COBOL programmers can make a fortune if they come back out of retirement.
Today it’s all C, C++, Objective C, Swift
I think the Computer Chronicles theme song is so short and simple because they were limited to only 64K
Man, this show looks ancient and yet, I was 16 when this aired. Weird idea. I went from Logo and Turtle to Pascal, to Basic, 6510 assembler, C++, ASP, Javascript, Perl, ASP.NET, Java, Python, C#, Objective C, and Swift. A programming language is just a tool and those tools have come a long way..
You went from Pascal to BASIC? That must've been disappointing.
Me born in 1989, in India:
Logo to GW Basic to Java (Blue J editor from Monash University Denmark) in class 10 to C++ in class 11/12 to C in Engineering 1st year Basic computing paper to machine level/assembly level code in 3rd year of engineering in Microprocessor paper to HTML CSS Javascript Ajax JSP SQL in my first job. 😅
And now I write codes in Python for AI/ML.
Damn Finger trouble
interesting to see these old videos. this is from a couple months before i was even born.
+kingcrimson234 I started 7th Grade at Traweek Junior High School (SoCal) in the fall of 84.
And some of the languages mentioned were quite old by then. FORTRAN 1957, COBOL 1969 and BASIC 1964! amazingly 50 & 60 years later, some form of all three still exist. in fact with Dos Box you can get the MS versions to run on a phone!
Ooops caught my own typo: COBOL was introduced in 1960, not 1969!, (damn! bad part about about pocket sized supercomputers: Pocket sized keyboards!)
And Basic language was the language that actually grew Best than the other ones discussed here contrary what was said here
BASIC was included in literally every home computer sold in the 1980s, and it also acted as the user interface and operating system to the whole computer. Basically everybody knew at least some BASIC statements...
Yay! LOGO got into Gary's list! The first language I learned.
I wish today's computer lessons were this detailed and clear. Now a days I think in my opinion everyone explianing/teching anything computer tech focus too much to dumb things down and short cuts we miss why and how things really work.
Hell yes. We have insane access to total information and our society is stupider than ever. It's really a case of zero attention span and loud hip hop creeping into everything. ADHD society.
Yikes. Please don't try to learn about computing from these. The Computer Chronicles episodes are a *very* high-level first pass at the topic, and the reason that they seem so clear is that they simplify things to an extreme degree in order to fit everything into the half-hour infotainment format.
@@HardCase1911 Blaming "loud hip hop" for a lack of intellectual curiosity is probably top 10 for me in terms of most boomer things I've ever read in my life
Since they were on PBS, they didn't have to cater to people with tiny attention spans, and they only had to beg people to like and subscribe during pledge breaks
Somehow I think that this COBOL guy doesn't really know what's talking about. Granted I don't know COBOL either but I'm not on TV. Gary Kildall had such a direct way of asking very pointed technical questions that it makes all the gaps show. Love this show.
Stuart: (speaks French)
Me: Hva?
1984, the year before I was first introduced to that IBM & the 5 1/4” floppy, age 10...
3:15 3:29 4:05 what system is that? Looks really advanced for 1984.
It's a Xerox Star, the commercial version of the Alto that inspired the Macintosh.
09:15 “Data-handling” and “file-manipulating” firmly built around the concepts of fixed-length fields and records, and ISAM files. These days “data-handling” and “file-manipulation” are more descriptive of what you might do in Perl or Python. They mainly involve free-format lines and text-heavy data, where you have to recognize patterns and delimiters rather than count columns.
I have worked with a number of programming languages on my Atari and Windows/Pentium computers. The languages that I am most familiar with are Action, Assembler/Editor, BASIC, COBOL, Logo, Pascal & Pilot.
A "bloke" touting "Personal- COBOL" for PC's, Pretty funny. We called it "Crowbar" back in the day.
Pascal and "C" are still around though..
Yes. "C" has been around since 1972! More Amazing than that: "Fortran" is STILL around. Fortran has been with us since 1957!!! COBOL is also still around, and it's from 1960!
@@jamesslick4790 and Pascal is still around as Free Pascal
@@josephf.2787 Yep! "BASIC" is still around too! I can't really name a high (or "mid") level language that's actually "dead". There may be a bit of "assembly" languages that are no longer used because the HARDWARE is no longer in use, But every language HIGHER than that has code running somewhere.
Of all the languages mentioned in the show, C is the only one still in common use and widely accepted today.
10:08
Say my name.
You're Eisenberg.....
You're god damn right!
Will check out Forth, wish the episode was longer and they talked about C.
6:53 god that Dinosaur computer sounds like a rocket ship. I can barely hear anyone talk all I hear is the computer.
The mic was too close to the fan. They moved it.
Photoshop v1.0 Mac was programmed in Pascal, the source code of this version has been published years ago and can be downloaded legally
here is the legal link to it: computerhistory.org/blog/adobe-photoshop-source-code/
40 years later and the entire computing industry has standardized around C and its curly-braced descendants (C++, C#., Objective-C, Java, JavaScript, Python, Go, Rust, etc.) and all the languages featured on the show have fallen by the wayside, except COBOL, which still runs 95% of the world's banking transactions despite nobody actually knowing how to program in it anymore. Paul O'Grady really dropped the ball in making COBOL more palatable to the masses.
16:37 “Business applications” which nowadays involve access to SQL databases, for example. Which means having good string facilities for dynamically generating SQL statements. Which COBOL is lousy at.
COBOL deals with SQL mainly through language extensions. IBM COBOL gained an EXEC SQL statement to interface to a DB2 database, for instance.
But one of the key points about COBOL was its portability between completely different machines from completely different manufacturers. So all that goes out the window once SQL comes in?
@@lawrencedoliveiro9104 But that's only true up to the standard. Vendors would happily add their own extensions if they thought it would give them a competitive advantage.
Said standard including no good capabilities for dealing with that standard business requirement called SQL, which was my point.
COBOL was already decades old when SQL became a thing. The applications that were built in COBOL and used its native, standard data access -- multiple flat files with fixed record lengths -- didn't suddenly stop working when SQL came out. Matter of fact, SQL wasn't really a business *requirement* until the 90s and those applications needed to be maintained in the 90s and beyond because you can't just "lift and shift" a COBOL application into an SQL database and expect everything to work.
COBOL is lousy at many things, but it's excellent within its niche, which is still a place modern solutions based on e.g. SQL and Java can't touch because of the environment it runs in.
Strange that C was not featured
C was still considered to be UNIX programming language in early 80s. I guess they selected lightweight languages because the show focused on 8 bit pc
lol Gary called her out at 14:43. He wasn't having her pretending that that program was written entirely in Forth and was going that fast lol
No he didn't. In her intro she said it incorporates aspects of machine language. He was highlighting a feature to the audience in that you can also use low level language in Forth.
Personal Cobol. Yeah that din't really catch on now did it! XD
hehe BUT if you learn COBOL today you can make SHIT LOADS of cash. Because banks still use the fuck out of it. Pretty much all transactions in banks and ATMs use it. The old programmers who've retired are making fuck tonnes of cash coming back to do EASY (to them) small jobs for loads of money because no one is learning COBOL no more so there aren't any programmers around.
C was designed to be transportable, even back in 1984.
geez, the computer at the beginning is so noisy!
IKR!
Meanwhile high-level programming requires years of education and writing extremely old fashioned complex syntax while the opposite should have happened... A child should actually be able to do it. I can understand top notch stuff such as AI is something different but come on..., even the simplest change for a user in integrated software requires a high-specialist and tons of time (cost). This by now should have been solved years ago.
You don't need years to learn Python.
진짜 저 당시에는 컴퓨터 엔지니어, 프로그래머들의 인상착의(ㅋㅋ)는 거의 대부분 대머리에 두꺼운 돋보기 안경을 낀 존나 클래식한 정장...
내가 95년부터 프로그래머로 근무했는데 Cobol Programmer로 재직할때 대머리가 거의 반반... 나도 대머리...ㅠㅠ
컴터에서 나오는 전자파가 당시에는 완벽하게 차폐되지 않은듯... 되게 웃긴게 결혼한 선배들은 거의 대부분 딸...딸...딸내미들 투성이...
당시에는 아들을 못낳으면 씨받이라도 들이는 풍조였는데... 지금은 딸바보 아빠들이 더 인정(?)받는 희한한 세상이 되었네...ㅋㅋㅋ
코볼 프로그램 디버깅할때 신택스 에러가 4~500개씩 발생하면 대부분 그걸 처리하는데 몇일이 걸리는 넘들도 많았는데...
그걸 10분도 안걸려서 해결하면 다들 '코볼신'으로 추켜세웠던게 기억남.... 로직에러는 잡기 어렵지만 신택스 에러는 겜하듯 아무것도
아닌것인데... 바부들... 지금은 다들 뭐하냐? 전산실에서 막강한 항온항습기의 위력에 한여름에도 오들오들 떨면서 근무하던
프로그래머들... 다들 잘있재?? 옛날에 매킨토시 클래식 만지작거리면서 너무 황홀해했던게 그립다... 옛날이 그리워~ (50대 아재 프로그래머)
:53 that music is better than anything Ive heard since 1982
What was Micro Focus selling? Was Personal COBOL their version of COBOL run in their IDE and complied w/ their compiler?
Yep, dumbed down cobol
BASIC on an IBM 360!
17:56 did he say shitload.
I think he meant to say "show", but quickly replaced it with "load".
As in "the next thing I'm going to sh... load in here is a blackjack program"
Based on that logo, looks like Forth Inc. is still around.
Wait!, Gary had a 13 year old Son in 84'? Where is he now?
5:37 omg who does that guy look like? He looks so familiar! He reminds me of someone so much, but I can't quite put my finger on it. lol he totally failed at the end and choked and didn't show the end of his presentation because he fucked something up 🤣 with "Finger trouble"
EDIT: Micheal Sheen! That's who he reminds me of.
Wow. February 9, 1984. That was only about 5 months after Computer Chronicles came out.
April 4, 2013
10 years later replying back.
@@oldtwinsna8347 Happy 10th anniversary!
April 4, 2023 8:03 pm
She said the company logo is a little chauvinistic at about 14:10. Could something explain to me what she meant?
Not the logo itself, but her showing the logo of her own company as a programming example.
Looks like Static Site Generators already existed in in 1984
Microfocus was great!
Question for anyone; why are new languages better or worse than these older languages? Wanna see the differences and their pros and cons.
How was that logo in FORTH "a little bit chauvinistic?" I don't get that at all.
"undue partiality or attachment to a group or place to which one belongs or has belonged"
It's a less common meaning of the word, but it's in the dictionary.
At 23.29. Did Gary say 'shitload' ?
The video doesn't go that far, it only goes to 23:09.
They didn't talk about C
It was not so popular then.
Back then, even early MS-DOS wasn't programmed in C. Microsoft used assembler in the early days. The compilers weren't that sophisticated and available memory was low.
But Microsoft has used C extensively for WinNT.
LOGO... I wish my teachers did *know* how to programme in it so that I wouldn't fail my computer exams for 3 damn years. Thank you, for you have inspired my interest in computer programming by not teaching me how to do so! See what kind of monster you have converted me into:
sum←{C←⍕√⍵+0v ⋄ (⍎1↑C) + +/{⍎⍵}¨99↑2↓⍕√⍵+0v} ⋄ +/∊{sum ⍵}¨N~(N←⍳100)*2
APL looks so elegant.
"Locate phil." No, locate him yourself.
Where can I find these vintage computers ??
Not much has changed. People still invent new languages everyday and there are too many to choose from. It’s probably worse today really. We have factions these days
I love USA!
19:54-20:25 hahaha her train wreck of an argument just keeps getting weirder
i found the person who doesnt know what is going on :/
@Melon Husk that isnt the insult you think it is and isn't by any definition relevant to what was said X''D
Personal COBOL... and along came Excel
Wonder what happened to fourth
you mean forth? it was entirely superseded by c, taking the same role but with more structured and standardized syntax.
It's still in use today! en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forth_(programming_language)
Quote: "Forth is used in the Open Firmware boot loader, in space applications such as the Philae spacecraft, and in other embedded systems which involve interaction with hardware."
I really didn't expect that.
Posix?
I am in love with jQuery.
I hate jQuery
There might be just one thing that is worse than COBOL, and that would be generated COBOL
I was thinking BASIC and PASCAL
18:11 Lol, he's your son!
Wow... 3 levels of language and the examples was totally off, even for back then. Machine language/Assembler could be considered the same level, and the lowest level. Then structured languages, like C, Pascal or Fortran, etc... Lastly, macro (and today scripting) languages.
The internet ruined the world
The computer folk back then looked more like resident medical doctors..now most look like hippies and the like
I feel like Elizabeth Rather is trying to hide her southern accent, but it breaks through all the time.
gw belum lahir mereka sudah bahas bahasa pemrograman wkwkwk
Cheifet: "Hey, Gary, next week's show is on programming languages. Why don't you demonstrate CP/M a little."
Gary: "I think I'd rather talk about logo."
Cheifet: "Come on, CP/M, that's your baby. Why don't you..."
Gary: "I SAID I'LL TALK ABOUT LOGO, OK???OK!!!!"
CP/M is not a programming language
the COBOL guy reminds me way too much of Tony Blair.
Thank goodness he doesn't sound as effeminate as Blair and I doubt he is as dishonest or greedy as Blair
Micro Prose guy is Satan's Hype Man
MicroProse was a game developing company. Didn't you mean Microsoft?
"Do I have permission to possess a dolla-(p)ain?" And Stewart's last name is French. Tsk tsk. Glad he stuck to programming languages.
Was everyone in the 80s this boring and passive?
What is that terribly irritating sound? HDD? Absolutely horrible.
wowz!!! 4th had a hot babe company president
I guess you can consider that hot in the female nerd world
That British guy sounds so pretentious.
@@DJKinney I watch a lot of British programming, and that guy dials the pretentious up to 11.