As well as useful tutorials the website lets you compile and execute code.
It made me wonder if there are any sites that let you compile and execute by email e.g. you email your code to the server it complies and tries to execute it and then emails back the compiler and program output.
I have tried to Google this but have not come up with a search query that does not return a zillion hits.
Does anybody know of such a beast I am sure they must have existed at one time?
Reminds me of my earliest exposure to computing back in the 70's, where you took your stack of punched cards to the computer centre ( at college ) and came back next day to see if it had compiled.
allanhurst:
Reminds me of my earliest exposure to computing back in the 70's, where you took your stack of punched cards to the computer centre ( at college ) and came back next day to see if it had compiled.
I was about to post the exact same thing.
It was always a rush to punch a few cards between lectures, and was always very annoying that a whole day was wasted when that rushed card had a spelling mistake. (Except for the job card of course, once you had a working job card it got used until it fell apart.)
In my earliest exposure to professional computing we used Intel MDS's - the infamous 'blue box', and it took about 40 minutes to compile, link and download a project to the (8085) target. About 30k of code. A lot of 8" floppy clanking.
That was bad enough.
Later I was involved in a job where an old DEC10 mainframe was used for doing much the same for a Z80 target - and it took 12 hours! Debugging involved finding a fault (!?) then patching in assembler on a terminal to check.
edit: actually I think they did it in HEX! nedit.
The team were only allowed one run a week over the weekend as the DEC was used for used for lots of other stuff
( mostly accounts) during the week.
They have for some but not for all. When I found the online compilation site it reminded me about another thread where people were really disadvantaged by limited access to computers and very poor electricity supplies and internet connections.
I know in the past people would write programs on coding sheets and send them by snail mail getting the results the same way. That made me think that taking a step back in technology to compile and execute via email could actually be a step forward for some people; many people can use a single computer to send emails and sending emails requires much less bandwidth and is much more robust against electrical and network outages than online access.
Before the WWW all sorts of things were done via email e.g. uuencode and uudecode were written by Mary Ann Horton at UC Berkeley in 1980 for encoding binary data for transmission in email systems allowing executables to be sent when emails were just plain text with no attachments.
Since compilations were done by post I am sure there must have been an email version at some stage but I cannot find anything in google.
allanhurst:
Reminds me of my earliest exposure to computing back in the 70's, where you took your stack of punched cards to the computer centre ( at college ) and came back next day to see if it had compiled.
Mostly it hadn't.
Things have moved on.
Allan
My first hands-on was punch cards in 75. Results got back in to so long to the print queue I'm sure but getting the pages took 60-90-120 mins.
Later I was involved in a job where an old DEC10 mainframe was used for doing much the same for a Z80 target - and it took 12 hours! Debugging involved finding a fault (!?) then patching in assembler on a terminal to check.
The team were only allowed one run a week over the weekend as the DEC was used for used for lots of other stuff
( mostly accounts) during the week.
This was in the mid 80's.
IMO the death of the dinos and rise of the micros was much due to the cost of doing anything on the big iron.
Dev tools for micros advanced like wildfire compared. I remember an XT bus card that let PC's be IBM terminals that could run PCXT editors and productivity software that would have cost major bucks to implement on a 370.
In the end of the 80's I replaced a system 34 with a turbo-XT for a small company with a turbo-XT. Their RPG software was so poorly written (crap dev tools and not the brightest programmer) that my rewrite cut 45 min process to 15 and then using RAM drive cut that to under 30 secs. We could afford to experiment on the XT for less than having IBM priesthood types come and talk about "options" on the sys34.
For the last few years I've been seeing the new breed of smaller machines moving in. Death to Dinos! Hurrah for the Rats!
allanhurst:
Later I was involved in a job where an old DEC10 mainframe was used for doing much the same for a Z80 target - and it took 12 hours! Debugging involved finding a fault (!?) then patching in assembler on a terminal to check.
I was writing Z80 code in the mid 80s. It compiled almost instantaneously...on a Sinclair Spectrum.
The results, if you'd got something wrong and overwritten the screen memory, were spectacular.
I had a near instant code and test cycle for the first time in 78 with my TI SR-56.
It is primitive to say the least but fit in a pocket and turned spare time to learn time.
Common computing really opened up with the PCXT clones.
allanhurst:
The team were only allowed one run a week over the weekend as the DEC was used for used for lots of other stuff
( mostly accounts) during the week.
My first was at High School, early 1970's, HP Basic.
Cards were optical, you used a 2H pencil to mark your cards.
Then they went to computer centre by bus, three days later they returned.
Frustrating for teenagers keen to do this great process of programming.
At Uni, you would put your pile of cards into the computer centre, then later look into your pigeon hole for your effort to come back, the groan when your pile came back wrapped in only one or two sheets of formfeed paper.
Tom...
Eric Idle: Who'd a thought thirty years ago we'd all be sittin' here drinking Chateau de Chassilier wine?
MP: Aye. In them days, we'd a' been glad to have the price of a cup o' tea.
GC: A cup ' COLD tea.
EI: Without milk or sugar
About 10 years ago I did a contract job for an old ( nameless ) Cambridge company which required monitoring and analysing a (fairly fast) datastream between two devices, and the management insisted I used their big VAX. I duly wrote this as a process and ran it. It used so much time that it nearly shut the company down, and after about 20 minutes the operators called and said 'please don't run this process again'
Good fun.
So I rewrote it on a PC as I suggested in the first place.and it worked fine
In the mid-late 80's I remember a report about 64 XT mobos connected as a 6 dimensional cube. It had 10% of the power of the big CRAY of the time but that it could do the same kinds of calculations at all was the amazing part. Use phone chips now instead! What are wires for grandpa? Oh yeah, those old time charging cables!
