Doghouse – The Year of *x

Tempus fugit

Article from Issue 211/2018
Author(s):

Maddog gives a brief history of the last (almost) half century of *x, plus a call for spreading the love.

A favorite expression of mine is ``Time flies when you are having fun.'' I usually save it for those few times when things are not going the way I hoped they would.

However, next year is 2019, and that is a very special year in my life. For in 2019, I will have been programming for 50 years ... or as I like to say it, ``a half century,'' which I think sounds more impressive than merely saying ``50 years.''

I learned to write my first program in Fortran on an IBM 1130 computer (with punched cards), through a correspondence course sponsored by the Western Electric Company, the manufacturing arm of the Bell System. I was an electrical engineering co-op student at Drexel University, and through this one course, I became ``hooked'' on programming.

[...]

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