Most mind-blowing program for your favorite calculator

[Steve Simpkin]

(06-30-2022 04:36 PM)Garth Wilson Wrote:  

(06-30-2022 03:40 PM)Maximilian Hohmann Wrote:  although I would not call it "mind blowing" as in the thread title. Rather brute force or "not using the right tool for the job".

LOL. Well, I got the TI-58c in Dec '81 for $100 at Jewelcor (remember those stores, which sold jewelry, electronics, cameras, etc.?), and perhaps a year later was in the right place at the right time to trade it and another $100 for a 59 and printer and some extra modules. I have a friend who paid $3K for an Apple II and extra memory and accessories probably a little before that, and the Commodore 64 would come out just after that for $600 (and monitor, disc drives, etc. were extra). There were no laptops yet, and the home computers were not portable like a calculator that took only a corner in the attache case. I took a class in FORTRAN IV in '82 at the local community college, and of all our assignments, I could get results much faster with my calculator than I could writing out the FORTRAN on coding sheets, going to the computer lab at school and sitting at the card-punch machine, then rubber-banding the set, along with my account number, and putting it in a cubby and coming back a couple of hours later hoping they had run it, only to find a printout of all the reasons it wouldn't run, and have to repeat this non-interactive process. It was kind of like in the movie "The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes" (the original from 1969, not the later 1995 one), where Medfield College was given this computer, free, because it was already so outdated.

Ha! I took a Fortran class at Cal Poly Pomona, California in 1983 and it was the same exact process! Sometimes my batch did not get run until the following day. It took forever to debug a program this way. It really encouraged you write it carefully the first time so you wouldn't have to go through those time consuming steps. I had bought an Ohio Scientific Challenger 1P computer in 1979 ($350) and had written a number of BASIC programs before this class. Using punch cards and waiting for your program to be run seemed like a huge step backwards compared to my rather primitive Challenger (which I still have). I understand they got rid of the card-punch machines at that college the following year. I also remember Jewelcor. I bought my HP-11C at one in 1987 ($56). I think they went out of business a few years after that.