interesting Univac ad from 1956

[GeorgeOfTheJungle]

(06-05-2014 11:45 PM)Dave Frederickson Wrote:  

(06-05-2014 10:57 PM)rprosperi Wrote:  Same year, I was learning Focal (the original one) and Fortran on a PDP-8. The math teacher warned us about the "dangers" of division by zero, and cautioned us to test for and handle it with some special message (who knows, perhaps he had seen the Univac Ad). Being annoying students, a couple of us decided that the special 'message' would be to rewind the DEC-TAPE (anyone here remember those?).

I learned Dartmouth BASIC on a PDP-8/I in '74. The DECtapes were at the school district office.

Dave

In '74 I was learning (hp) BASIC on a 9830A, the "mass memory" was a 1 mega bytes hard disk in a rack the size of a refrigerator. Division by 0 was error 103 and the result was "infinite":