[LINK] RIP Sandy Douglas

[David Lochrin]

On Wednesday 05 May 2010 11:32, Roger Clarke wrote:
> Mmmm, in 1967, Darling Harbour was rusting railway sidings.
> 
> And just on the western side of Pyrmont Bridge, you needed to walk on 
> the southern footpath.  If you were on the other side of the road, 
> you were liable to be bowled over by some sailor being thrown out of 
> the pub.  It was the sleaziest hotel in the whole of Sydney.

Ahhh yes, that would have been the old Royal George, home of the Libertarian Society (though they were becoming largely irrelevant by 1967), criminals, police, newspaper reporters, et al.  I wasn't a habitue, but I remember the yellowing walls stained with cigarette smoke and lit by bare bulbs, and the shady characters who frequented it.  Though many Libertarians, like George Molnar the younger, also had fairly respectable academic lives.

> MIS?  Well, there was a computer at UNSW - an IBM 360/30, and I 
> handed punched cards through a window and fetchedthe cards and 
> printout on continuous A3 with sprocket-holes, 24 hours later.

By then the small scientific & engineering system was establishing itself, such as the IBM 1130 running Fortran.  Interestingly, the Fortran language is still evolving.  Fortran 2003 supports such things as object-oriented programming, calling inter-operability with the 'C' language, IEEE exception handling, and polymorphism.  But these days Java is the object-oriented language du jour.

David