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Article #623605Re: The birth of BASIC
From: Peter Flass
Date: Tue, 05 Jun 2018 16:02
Date: Tue, 05 Jun 2018 16:02
36 lines
3293 bytes
3293 bytes
Quadibloc <jsa...@ecn.ab.ca> wrote: > On Monday, June 4, 2018 at 11:28:18 AM UTC-6, Quadibloc wrote: >> On Monday, June 4, 2018 at 11:12:41 AM UTC-6, Alan Bowler wrote: >>> On 2018-06-02 7:23 AM, Gareth's Downstairs Computer wrote: >>>> On 02/06/2018 03:44, John Levine wrote: > >>>>> Dartmouth's compiler was quite impressive, >>>>> typically compiling an entire program in one or >>>>> two clock ticks. It was so fast that nobody >>>>> bothered to save object code. > >>> Since the 635 and several generations of successors >>> were asynchronous machines I'm not clear what is >>> meant by "clock tick" > >> I don't think any compiler, no matter how impresive, could compile a program of >> any length in two processor clock cycles. > >> Compiling one in *two seconds* of wall-clock time, however, is perfectly >> possible, and it would have been impressive on a computer made from discrete >> transistors. > >> So I think the problem is that he meant a completely different kind of "clock >> tick" from the kind you were thinking of that the GE 635 didn't have. > > Or it could have even been able to compile a program in 1/30 of a second, not > just two seconds - which would be two 1/60 second "ticks" of the computer's > real-time clock... at least, many mainframes of that era synchronized their real > time clock to the mains frequency. > > Oops, the AC power frequency. If they called it _that_, it would be 1/50 second. <g> -- Pete
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