Legacy machines and applications

[navychop]

Not hardly. Paper tape in HS, punched cards in college. The IBM 360 was a donation to a school where I started my CS Master's. BIG mistake for the school to accept it. It was, of course, obsolete, and the school learned that for the cooling costs alone they could have bought an entire classroom of PCs. Any of us could have told them that, but I guess somebody's friend needed a tax deduction.

I don't think Pascal would scale up well to the kind of programming you were doing, if I understand it correctly. Large data bases or very large programs seemed it's downfall. ADA, maybe, if you could learn to love it. I knew people with an irrational hatred of it. Never took over as expected. Heck, I wouldn't be too surprised to find there was still a LASS programmer or two out there.

SCUBA- I'd love to know where we stashed those cards!

 

[SatelliteGAL]

Well, I'm old but not 90...... I learned COBOL, FORTRAN, RPGII in 1968

 

[TheForce]

Hate to tell you what I learned to do in '68.

 

[diogen]

Ada was essentially the last attempt to create a language that would have everything:
from the efficiency of assembler to the simplicity of algol...

After the failed attempt to make PL/1 play that role...

Diogen.

 

[Foxbat]

We're still using FORTRAN for our various OpenVMS systems at work. We've since added C and C## to the mix. For the newer stuff, the developers are using Visual Studio 2010.

I recently opened a closet and found a shrink-wrapped edition of Mac OS 7.5.1! The last Mac we had at work was pulled out over 12 years ago. Recently, though, one of our Technical Assistants had found some Word documents that no one could open using Word. I thought they might be WordPerfect .DOC files, but it turned out that they were done on the Macintoshes using Word 94. Fortunately, I was able to read the files using my copy of Word 2008 on my Mac Pro and write out a .DOCX file that preserved all the formatting and tables.

 

[diogen]

We're still using FORTRAN...

A good part of nuclear physics classic programs is still using a combination of assembler and fortran.
Heck, the first version of the SAS package was written in fortran...

Diogen.

 

[Ilya]

FORTRAN compilers were designed and well optimised for floating point calculations and there were tons of math libraries written for FORTRAN. Since math didn't change that much over the years, there is really no need for companies doing heavy floating point calculations to switch over to another programming language.

FORTRAN was my first programming language too!
(ALGOL doesn't really count!)