Hi,
I hadn't really appreciated how "young" was Basic when I first used it, via a teleprinter over a telephone line to a "time-sharing" IBM360 (as above) a few miles away, probably in 1969. It was really "fast" compared with waiting at least overnight for the stack of 80-column FORTRAN cards to come back from the air-conditioned computer room, with hopefully a few (but
only a few) pages of Line Printer output . Yes, truly hand-punched cards, using an ingenious mechanical device with IIRC twelve buttons and cryptic key labels. But we did have the "luxury" of just one automatic reader/printer/verifier, to show what the cards actually said. Also, some cards could be re-used, I still have burnt into my brain the individual and apparently tautological "STOP : END : FINISH" required for the simplest program.
But my first experience of "computing" was with Pegasus Autocode, probably around 1965, and as a "real engineer" (who never throws anything away) I went to a cupboard this morning and was able to take the attached photo. A Pegasus Autocode manual, a few sample cards and
5-hole tape as used by the Pegasus. It had only valves (tubes) of course, the "RAM" was a magnetic drum, the control panel had switches just like a manual telephone exchange (oh dear, I remember those as well) and the two CRTs on the front were only to display the clock waveforms (or maybe the data "eyes"). The manual refers to the "soon to be available" 10 characters/second teleprinter and the 150 cps paper tape punch with awe.
However, re-reading the manual, I'm impressed with its clarity, conciseness (only 45 pages) and the facilities available. Many functions (such as ARCTAN), floating point numbers up to 10^ +/-76 to "about 9 digits accuracy", and an ability to jump temporarily to "Machine Instructions". The main limitations seem to have been: only one operator per line (now where have I seen that recently?), that labels could be only "a small integer followed by a )" and a "subroutine" consisted of assigning a label of the next line in the program to a variable, with the "return" being a jump to that stored variable!
But sorry, I still don't consider myself an OF !
Cheers, Alan.