did anyone ever program in RPG?

[Don Shepherd]

I received an old RPG programming book today, courtesy of Ebay. It was published in 1970 and addressed RPG programming on both the IBM 360 and the IBM System 3. Here are a few interesting tidbits from this old tome.

The authors claim that "K", as in 64K of memory, actually stands for multiples of 1028. Hmm, I always thought (and still think) that K=1024. How could they get this wrong?

When did "flowcharts" become "block diagrams" (perhaps when "Data Processing" became "Information Technology")? I realize nobody uses these today, but they were big when I began programming.

Apparently, early versions of RPG did not have square root functions; the book shows an example of RPG code that implements square root using the Newton-Raphson techniques. I wonder how trig functions were done in RPG. Since RPG seemed to be mostly designed for business processing, maybe that is a moot point.

The book looks into the future and briefly discusses "voice response" and includes the following sentence: Perhaps in the not-too-distant future some limited conversation ability will be possible with computers.

Hmm, Siri and Alexa, are you listening?

The 1970's were interesting.