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How did people program back then?
6 Answers
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you have to be more specific, which time period?
at one point, programming was punching holes in cardboard and putting it in a computer for example
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like 1960-1999
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đșđș catđșJamesđșđș well by that time they already had higher-level languages and electronic computers and the main languages were COBOL, BCPL, JOSS and FORTRAN, and later there were C, Pascal, Prolog and around the 80s-90s is when most of the languages we know today were created.
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How?
Teletypewriters: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teleprinter
Terminals:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_terminal
Later on, modern screens.
On what?
Timesharing systems (many programmers sharing a computer).
Namely, IBM systems, PDP-11s, later on MIPS machines and x86s (on personal computers this time).
What OS ?
IBM had its own OSes the descendant of which is z/OS (check out the mother of all demos). Unix came about in the early 70s on PDPs and later many other computers. IBM/MS DOS (later Windows) also appeared, but it was never popular with most programmers.
What languages?
System programming - assembly, later C.
Science - Fortran, later C
Accounting - COBOL, later awk
Application - Assembly, Fortran, later Pascal, C, C++, Java
OOP - Simula -> Smalltalk -> C++ -> Java
Scripting - on Unix: shell scripting, later Perl, on DOS: batch files. Don't know about IBM systems.
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Thanks Vald Serbu
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thanks hinanawi!