Programming, Half a Century Back

In his book titled Hackers, Stephen Levy describes how computer programs were written as recently as 1959:

-       Not anyone could submit a program; you needed “official clearance” first. After all, the large-as-a-room computers cost a bomb;

-       An operator would punch holes in long cards corresponding to the program: each hole represented an instruction to the computer;

-       A “stack of these cards made a computer program”;

-       Wait, there’s more! Those cards would be taken to another operator, who would feed the cards to a “reader” that would note where the holes were and dispatch them to the computer;

-       As if all this wasn’t bad enough, it could hours, even days, before one got to see the output. And often it would just prove there was an error in the program!

At MIT, the operators of the computer were referred to as the Priesthood, and “those privileged enough to submit data to those most holy priests were the official acolytes”. As might be expected, even the “low-level sub-priest” would throw his weight around.

As Levy writes, MIT had professors with diametrically opposite on computers. There was John McCarthy’s view, a stance “obvious from the very arrogance of the name that McCarthy had bestowed upon it: Artificial Intelligence”. He had the gall to believe that computers could be “smart” when the common view was that they were just “absurdly expensive tools for number-crunching”.

When one of the first transistor run computers, the TX-0, came to MIT, the students were in awe:

“This machine did not use cards.”

You typed instructions onto a long thin paper tape, sat at a console, fed the tape through a reader; and (drum beats) “be able to sit there while the program ran”. You could even diagnose a problem by using some of the switches. No wonder this is how Levy describes the students’ enthusiasm to the TX-0:

“You could even modify a program while sitting at the computer. A miracle!... Hey you nuns! Would you like to meet the Pope?”

The TX-0 was “inspiring a new form of programming”.

Not all professors at MIT were enamored by computers though. Some considered an obsession with computers as “frivolous, even demented”. One student even had to explain to his engineering professor what a computer was! A clash between the computer v anti-computer brigade was inevitable.

An assignment in a Numerical Analysis class required homework via “rattling, clunky electro-mechanical calculators”. Horrified at the prospect of “working with those low-tech machines”, a student, Bob Wagner wondered:

“Why should we, when we’ve got this computer?”

And so Wagner started writing a program to emulate a calculator. This may sound trivial today, but remember, those days, you had to program a computer even to multiply two numbers. And then there was the problem of dealing with decimal numbers and figuring where to place the decimal point! It took Wagner 2-3 months, but he got it done.

“He had made a ridiculously expensive computer perform the function of a calculator that was one-thousandth the price. To honour this irony, he called the program “Expensive Desk Calculator”, and proudly did the homework for his class on it.”

His grade? Zero! Why? This was the professor’s reason:

“You used a computer! That can’t be right.”

The anti-computer brigade may have won the grading round, but it was exactly this kind of thinking of the computer brigade that would go on to change the world.