Fantastic link! Thanks!
Yes, I stand corrected. My old brain is not as good at remembering details. SOAP is the assembler.
The IBM floating point interpreter was done by folks at Stanford. It was called the Bell Floating-Decimal Interpretive System. I have a book called Internal Translator (IT), a compiler for the 650.
Unfortunately, the book is undated.
IBM eventually released it as one of their books, as referenced in the Wikipedia page on the 650, item 24.
http://bitsavers.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/pdf/ibm/650/28-4024_FltDecIntrpSys.pdf
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Thatās huge. I wrote a Z80 spell checker that hashed a compressed dictionary and came up with the nearest spellings if it did not find a match. That was 124 bytes long. You came up with stuff that you could not understand the following day unless you wrote comments that talked you through what was going on, just like that.
Happy days? Well, they seemed so at the time, but I wouldnāt go back.
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Yup. Anyone else seeing an opportunity here?
Thereās a lot of crap code out there, and rubbish compiling. Everything could run so much better, if it were well coded. No reason to sit on our butts and accept the status quo.
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Oh yeah? In my day we had nothing but ones and zeros. I wrote an entire database one time using nothing but zeroes.
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You, sir, are awesome. (My favorite Dilbert of all time.)
My own early experience dates back to the use of Hollerith card decks. I thought those to be the ultimate challenge until an older colleague chastised me.
āOur (older) Hollerith cards werenāt printed with the code along the top line. If you dropped a deck, the only way to re-order it was to self-interpret the punch holes.ā
That conversation came back to mind decades later watching the āoperatorsā monitoring the flowing green number sequences onscreen in āThe Matrix.ā
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I recently optimized some code that I had earlier slapped together without thinking too hard about it to generate some complex outputs for a deadline. There were two things I had done, that are fairly standard Python practices, and not a problem when done to a 200k data structure or done 20,000 times, but are incredibly slow when done repeatedly to a 200MB data structure or done 50,000,000 times (eg, in both cases, they get slower the further you iterate them, more than linearly). Fixing them got me close to 100x runtime improvement on the longer-running implementations without even multithreading it. So that attitude of āI donāt know what this method is actually doing to do what it does, as long as it gives me the output I want, becaues processor cycles are cheapā can still bite us.
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Remember drawing a diagonal line across the top edge of the deck to make it easy to re-sort in case disaster happened?
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Regarding code optimization, ive occasionally heard grumblings from programmers i know that itās better to have inefficient code, because 1500 lines of terrible coding is seen as āmore work doneā by the techo-illiterate managers than 30 lines of good code.
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My security oriented self cringes at the sentiment, but I also know most coders are working to get āfeaturesā in on deadline. With these sorts of incentives, weāre seldom going to get optimal or secure code.
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Part of the problem is nobody really teaches program design and proper structure as an abstract concept - itās all about literacy and banging out code as fast as possible. Little time is spent on theory of operation and how to write elegant routines that run efficiently.
Itās one reason why I believe all CS students should be required to take several courses in ādeadā languages like COBOL or C. They should also be required to program on paper first so it reinforces the importance of design first - code second.
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The flip side of that is most of the studentās future employers have no incentive for them to write what we would call āelegantā routines.
Soā¦ how long before some maniac creates an emulator (a la DOSBOX), that allows you run the code and fly Apollo like a flight simulator, with views of all the cockpitās control panels and pilotās-eye view of outside?
Itās going to happen. And itās going to be amazing.
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bonus points for doing this in minecraft
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It might already be a Kerbal plugin. 
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Bonus points for doing this in Kerbal, in Minecraft.
(Thatās assuming we arenāt all in Minecraft already).
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I used to lurk on the Scary Devil Monastery (AKA alt.sysadmin.recovery). āWhen I was a ladā style retro-computing bragging contests were rather common there.
One of the regulars (who, incidentally, was the person who first taught me motorcycle mechanics) was an old-school punchcard wrangler herself, but had the ultimate trump card via her Mum.
Sheād been one of the techs maintaining CSIRAC.
What is this āpast tenseā you speak of?
ā/ insert obscure joke here
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