Aw, that’s a shame. Way more impressive than anything I ever attempted. I wonder if you had the same calculator I did? My mum bought me the one recommended by the school, which I’m sure was chosen for its low price rather than quality. Some of the boys had much more advanced ones, I was jealous.
I still have my old QBasic programs on a floppy disc somewhere. Unfortunately, I haven’t had a floppy drive in 15 years.
Not sure what happened to the old Casio calculator. I never really needed it after A-levels; calculators were useless in university level maths.
A long time ago a friend once got me a little job writing some code to translate some course materials that were computerized so students could sit at computer, read stuff, get fed questions, get new stuff fed to them based on their answers, etc. It’s called CAI for “Computer Assisted Instruction”.
The original materials were in IBM/SRI CourseWriter code. The target language may have been PILOT.
The spec for the job was that something like 96+% of the code was to be automatically translated. The rest would need to be translated by hand (by someone other than me). This turned out to be an easy goal to reach.
But I had to learn both languages. I never actually wrote anything in either. Per the thread title, learned but not used.
Probably not then; the calculator used was this one and it wasn’t cheap at the time. There were no other options…nice deal for Casio.
I would be tempted to get a usb floppy drive and get that data. Some of it is likely lost already but some should be salvageable.
Genuinely I think it’s a shame when data is gone for good, even if it is just fairly trivial programs. We all have to do our bit for the human code archive complete
That reminds me - did anyone here copy games from Dave Ahls’s book of Basic Games? I translated the Star Trek game there into Pascal which was the test case for my group’s PDP-11 Pascal compiler. I made some changes - I changed the name of the lifeboat from Fairy Queen (might have been Fairee Queen) to USS Titanic. (Yes, I know it is RMS Titanic, but it was USS Titanic in the Jaime Brockett version of what I think is a Leadbelly song.)
I still have my copy. When I was learning Python a while back, I translated Hammurabi to improve my skill. Maybe I ought to try another game or two from it just for the fun of it.
True. Not as much of a shame as the bitcoins my husband mined for fun in the early days being lost when a hard drive died, though. If that hard drive had been salvageable, we could be millionaires!
When i started my career in IT, i was as an operator. I’d programmed some
Fortran, Pascal and mostly BASIC in college, but i’d never seen Mumps…
It looks a bit like this :
N S,N,T,I,K,Q S I="K",S="11",K="11",Q="R",T="K"
I I=T D T
Q:$Q Q Q
T I I,S&K S S=S+K Q
Then one night, i found a listing one of the programmers had left on a printer
which had some clues in it ! It was like finding the Rosetta stone ! :-
N S,N,T,I,K,Q S I="K",S="11",K="11",Q="R",T="K"
I I=T D T W "Klingons approaching" F T=1:3:9,G $L7
Q:$Q Q Q S ^Photon_Torpedos=T-1
T I I,S&K S S=S+K Q
(NB that is just some code i copied from the Mumps wikipedia page
for illustration only - i don’t remember any real Mumps code !)
It didn’t take long to figure out what was going on. Not long after that, i wrote
a screen editor for Mumps - the programmers were impressed !
MUMPS (Massachusetts General Hospital Utility Multi-Programming System) was a world unto itself. It was an early interpretive language like BASIC as far as the language part goes, but it also was an integrated operating system and database. The weird syntax comes from it early days. Reducing command and function names to single characters made the crude interpreter run faster in a number of ways. Later versions tokenized the source code but the abbreviated names provided another advantage, you could see a lot of code on a screen at one time, so MUMPS programmers continued the style even when it was not necessary for execution efficiency.
MUMPS over time became a highly standardized language with many providers but eventually most of the different implementations were absorbed by a single company, Intersystems, which still provides the language in its IRIS system.
The system has been used widely in the medical community, it lies at the heart of many major health care systems. It’s also found it’s way into a number of financial and municipal systems. It’s done so because it is highly efficient in price performance aspects. Despite that an enormous portion of the computer industry ignores it because it looks different.
For curiosity I just tried to look “IRIS” up on wiki. They did not have a relevant entry under that name, but as an aside, I found that their disambiguation page for “IRIS” (Iris - Wikipedia) is probably one of the most wide-ranging on all of wiki. One could easily waste an entire day just reading about all the various sorts of things labeled IRIS. Would those be irii? And why is it such a popular name / initialism?
Returning to your actual point …
Wiki does have an article on MUMPS with see alsos & references for those interested in the rest of that story.
Start here looking at IRIS. You’ll have to dig for a while to find any reference to MUMPS, if there is one. The original language has been subsumed in a modern version of the language. MUMPS was never simply a language, it was a multi-programming system and database system as well.
Here is a variation of a Hello World program that instead of sending the output to a presumed to be available terminal store the string “Hello World” in a persistent database arbitrarily names ‘Database’.
Set ^Database=“Hello World”
That’s it in it’s entirety, no file spec, no Open or Close command, no table creation, nothing else is needed. That string is stored away persistently available for access by any other user on the system. Want to index the entry by data and time?
Set ^Database($H)=“Hello World”
$H is the function that returns a string containing the number of days since Dec. 31, 1840 (IIRC), and the number of seconds since the previous midnight. Again, that’s all there is to it.
The syntax of MUMPS is goofy. It’s semantics are extremely powerful for a procedural language.
I had a copy of that book. I typed in many of the games on my dad’s Osborne 1. I still have the Osborne, but no idea what ever happened to the book.
I remember the program for creating a maze and tried to rewrite it at some point without the GOTOs to try to make it easier to understand, but always managed to get lost trying to follow the spaghetti code.
I remember Mumps, sort of. Some friends programmed in it so I saw some code. Lots of good buzz about it back in the day. Haven’t come across it since. Oh, well.
I don’t know if you could call it a computer per se but at my first real job, in the corner was an IBM accounting machine that ran on plugboards. It was used for toting up everyone’s hours then printing out the paychecks.
It was paid for, it did the job, there was no reason to replace it.
I have a vintage Time-Life Mathematics book from 1965 that I first read when I was in junior high school. It was a great introduction to some advanced mathematics concepts, but the only mention they have about computer programming was about plug boards.
I bought an old IBM plug board and some manuals on eBay several years ago to show to my computer science students, specifically in the SQL database class. You didn’t need a fancy computer to sort, copy, print, calculate totals, and print nice reports, since plug board tabulators were quite powerful for handling data on punch cards. It was “computing”, in a way. But would I never be able to program one today.
This reminds me of MUSIC, McGill Univeristy System for Interactive Computing that McGill actually sold to a few unfortunate institutions. I learned it and used it to edit a book I was co-writing and my coauthor was able to sign in to it using some networks that briefly sprang up before the Internet became a thing (Tymnet in the US which could connect to Datapac in Canada). The book came out at the end of 1984.
And why is it such a popular name / initialism?