For more on the evolution of JOSS in Boston, see book page (not pdf page) 61 ("From JOSS to LOGO") at http://walden-family.com/bbn/bbn-print2.pdf Sent from my iPad On Sep 2, 2015, at 9:55 PM, Murray Turoff <murray.turoff@gmail.com> wrote:
It took the introduction of time sharing to break down the financial barrier to online programming and a lot of other creative activities where the main frames could be shared by many users at the same time. The earliest systems to bring this about was the JOSS system at RAND and an oscilloscope based numerical programing system at UC Berkely. JOSS was a very innovative design as a programming language and if RAND had had more sense about allowing it to be propagated with out tying it to the specialized terminal RAND developed for it, it might have beaten BASIC in popularity. The developers were a two person team of a systems programmer and a psychologist. If you have not seen the language take a look at it. A later advanced version of joss was used to development the first hospital information system at a hospital in Boston.
On Wed, Sep 2, 2015 at 12:00 PM, Dag Spicer <dspicer@computerhistory.org> wrote: Woz still has his Apple II hardware and software design notes… in a binder, on paper, handwritten. He has shown them to me. The most obvious observation on this theme is that in the days of “cards and paper” computing, with its limited memory and a code-exeute-debug cycle measured in days, people took much longer to code and were more deliberate in writing software. In theory, people could write better software. In practice, programmers often just spent hours and hours waiting with nothing to do. (A related issue: modern-day programmers often explain their lack of apparent activity at times by saying “I’m compiling right now.” Managers invariably accept this as sensible and valid… even though it’s a running joke among programmers that the benefit of this explanation is that it really just gives them a bit of downtime to relax).
A general observation about card and paper computing in the 1960s: Bob Bemer, I think (paraphrase): "Computers cost $600 an hour; your time (as a programmer) costs $12 an hour. Guess what we’re optimising for?”
Dag -- Dag Spicer Senior Curator Computer History Museum Editorial Board, IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 1401 North Shoreline Boulevard Mountain View, CA 94043-1311
Tel: +1 650 810 1035 Fax: +1 650 810 1055
On Sep 2, 2015, at 6:38 AM, dave.walden.family@gmail.com<mailto:dave.walden.family@gmail.com> wrote:
I have a vague, perhaps wrong, memory of Woz's autobiography saying he wrote code in notebooks for machines he was imagining.
Sent from my iPad
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_______________________________________________ This email is relayed from members at sigcis.org, the email discussion list of SHOT SIGCIS. Opinions expressed here are those of the member posting and are not reviewed, edited, or endorsed by SIGCIS. The list archives are at http://lists.sigcis.org/pipermail/members-sigcis.org/ and you can change your subscription options at http://lists.sigcis.org/listinfo.cgi/members-sigcis.org
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Distinguished Professor Emeritus Information Systems, NJIT homepage: http://is.njit.edu/turoff