[NTLK] John McCarthy

[Tony Kan]

Hi Andrei

I was one of the first at my High School (Queen Elizabeth College) to get
into computers and the local university (Massey) had an old Burroughs B6700
or B7700 computer.  They gave me access to it.  Punch cards back then:
eeeewwwww.

Burroughs was merged into Unisys along with Sperry. I see sales have been
declining and it made a USD 12m loss last year.

The Algol language influenced the syntax of B, C, Pascal, Simula and Ada.
BTW, I've still got a cousin who makes a living doing COBOL programming!

Cheers

Tony Kan

Christchurch
New Zealand


-----Original Message-----
From: newtontalk-bounces at newtontalk.net
[mailto:newtontalk-bounces at newtontalk.net]On Behalf Of Andrei Chichak
Sent: Thursday, 27 October 2011 3:38 p.m.
To: newtontalk at newtontalk.net
Subject: Re: [NTLK] John McCarthy


Tony,

Where did you learn Algol W? That, along with APL, were my first languages
that I learned at the University of Alberta on a huge Amdahl system running
MTS.

I followed that with Pascal, Modula, many assemblers, fortran, cobol,
newtonscript, C, more C, and yet more C, niche languages like simula, acsl,
and so on.

Andrei
[snip]