“50 Years of Landsat”

[Lynn McGuire]

“50 Years of Landsat”
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2022/07/23/50-years-of-landsat/

“We’re celebrating 50 years of the Landsat satellite, the first of which
launched on July 23, 1972. The latest in the series, Landsat 9,
launched in September 2021.”
https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/landsat/main/index.html

Some of NASAs finest technology.

Lynn

[Charles Packer]

Landsat-related work comprised a significant part of my programming
career.

[Lynn McGuire]

Cool.

Thanks,
Lynn

[Thomas Koenig]

Charles Packer <mai...@cpacker.org> schrieb:

Are you a Real Programmer, then, with the main languages FORTRAN
and assembler?

[Dorothy J Heydt]

In article <tboq47$lu1$1...@newsreader4.netcologne.de>,

(Hal Heydt)
A Real Programmer can write a FORTRAN program in *any* language.

Two other points come to mind... First, which version of
FORTRAN. I initially learned FORTRAN II on an IBM 1620 Mod. I
(along with SPS II, the assembly language for that machine).

When I started out being paid as a programmer, I wrote some quite
decent FORTAN programs in COBOL.

[Charles Packer]

On Tue, 26 Jul 2022 13:27:35 +0000, Thomas Koenig wrote:

> Charles Packer <mai...@cpacker.org> schrieb:
>>

>> Landsat-related work comprised a significant part of my programming
>> career.
>
> Are you a Real Programmer, then, with the main languages FORTRAN and
> assembler?

My first introduction to programming came using FORTRAN at a
NSF-sponsored summer institute for high school students. Then I
didn't see programming again until entering the job market after
dropping out of graduate school. JOVIAL, anybody? Then came the
Landsat work which was not only in assembler but an exotic variety
for pipeline processors.

[Quadibloc]

On Wednesday, July 27, 2022 at 2:04:43 AM UTC-6, Charles Packer wrote:
> Then came the
> Landsat work which was not only in assembler but an exotic variety
> for pipeline processors.

To some who may be puzzled by this statement, on the basis that
perfectly ordinary processors, like the Pentium and its successors,
have pipelines... I presume what is meant here is that the pipeline
processors in question are intended to have high performance,
but don't have extra circuitry for things like out-of-order execution.

In that case, the machine language of such a computer includes
provision for things not normally found in ordinary computers.

For example, there may be "branch windows". This means that
instead of an instruction "jump to address x if the result of the
last calculation was negative", one has an instruction that does
the same thing... *after* the following two instructions have
executed.

John Savard

[pete...@gmail.com]

On Wednesday, July 27, 2022 at 4:04:43 AM UTC-4, Charles Packer wrote:
> On Tue, 26 Jul 2022 13:27:35 +0000, Thomas Koenig wrote:
>
> > Charles Packer <mai...@cpacker.org> schrieb:
> >>
> >> Landsat-related work comprised a significant part of my programming
> >> career.
> >
> > Are you a Real Programmer, then, with the main languages FORTRAN and
> > assembler?

JOVIAL, anybody?

There's a name I haven't heard in ages. Jules Own Version of the International
Algorithmic Language. Based on ALGOL, originally called IAL.

Pt

[Dorothy J Heydt]

In article <rk6EK.546159$zgr9....@fx13.iad>,

(Hal Heydt)
JOVIAL == Jules' Own Version of the International Algorithmic
Language. That is, a variant of ALGOL. (Frightening that I
didn't have to look that up.)

JOVIAL was, IIRC, developed and used at the Naval Electronics Lab
on Point Loma, just outside San Diego, CA.

[Lynn McGuire]

I started writing Fortran for my father when I was 15 in 1975. One of
his programmer engineers (who lived with us), would write a subroutine
on the back of computer paper. I would keypunch it onto cards for him,
get it to compile and give the card deck to him. Getting the code to
compile was always the interesting part as he was not too careful about
his variable names and goto labels.

Lynn

[William Hyde]

I did a little (very little) programming in APL, also in 75. On starting my
MSc in 76 a 2500+ line FORTRAN program landed on my desk, with orders
to modify it and from then onward I wrote mostly in that language, though
a messy problem with the compiler we used necessitated a visit to
assembly language country from which I barely escaped alive.

William Hyde

[Scott Lurndal]

I was teaching myself PAL-D in '76, after learning Basic the
year before (both on a PDP-8 running TSS8.24); followed by SPL/3000 in '77.

[Lynn McGuire]

When we started building a 386 PC version in 1988, our NDP Fortran
compiler had a bug with intermediate jumps. Out of our 5,000+
subroutines, I had to compile three subroutines to assembly language and
change the Jump Near instructions to Jump Far. Was a pain when I did
complete rebuilds which I am famous for.

Lynn

[Gary R. Schmidt]

Haven't heard mention of SPL for a very long time, some of the things
those old 16-bit HP 3000's did were quite dreadful - passwords stored in
clear in block 1 (or was it 2???) of the disk...

I remember we were looking at getting our SPL stuff 'translated' into C
to go onto the new 32-bit Spectrum MPE boxes (we had another product
that did a similar job written in C that worked on UNIX), and a mob in
India claimed to have the skills...

So we sent them some code, some stuff we had written, and a copy of the
SPOOFLE thingie that just about everybody ran that had been sed'ded to
change the names and a bit of manual mangling.

We got back this set of lovely little functions that each had their own
array which was used as a stack and had things pushed on and popped off
it, all in glorious isolation, of the "when you see this, do that",
type, and so on.

And the SPOOFLE came back the same - but any MPE/SPL type should have
recognised it for what it was and said, "Use the built in one".

Needless to say they didn't get the work.

A bit later someone at HP let the cat out the bag that they had an
internally-developed SPL emulator for the Spectrum boxes, or something,
so that problem went away, but I think COCAM was eventually re-written
in C some time after I was sacked for being, "able to read a spreadsheet
over the accountant's shoulder". :-) (That's not what they said, but
being able to spot strange numbers in long lists was why they'd hired me
in the first place. You shouldn't let people who can do that look at
the screens in the accountant's offices, particularly when you're
playing jiggery-pokery with the numbers! ;-) )

Cheers,
Gary B-)

[Charles Packer]

On Wed, 27 Jul 2022 17:46:36 +0000, Dorothy J Heydt wrote:

> JOVIAL was, IIRC, developed and used at the Naval Electronics Lab on
> Point Loma, just outside San Diego, CA.

I checked the Wikipedia article on JOVIAL to confirm this, since
I assumed that the language was developed at SDC's headquarters
in Santa Monica. I found nothing on that, but there is this
oddity: in a code snippet given as an example, the lines are
terminated with semi-colons. When I coded in it between 1968 and
1976, the lines still had to end with dollar signs.

[Charles Packer]

On Wed, 27 Jul 2022 09:20:49 -0700, Quadibloc wrote:

> On Wednesday, July 27, 2022 at 2:04:43 AM UTC-6, Charles Packer wrote:
>> Then came the Landsat work which was not only in assembler but an
>> exotic variety for pipeline processors.
>
> To some who may be puzzled by this statement, on the basis that
> perfectly ordinary processors, like the Pentium and its successors, have
> pipelines... I presume what is meant here is that the pipeline
> processors in question are intended to have high performance,
> but don't have extra circuitry for things like out-of-order execution.

Well, circa 1977 they definitely came in a bigger package.
About the size of a deep freeze. To make sure that the one being
built by General Electric in Syracuse could be gotten into our site
in Beltsville, Md., a full-size mockup in cardboard was put
together and lifted through the doors and up the staircase.

[Default User]

My final years as a productive member of society involved a project to
upgrade some aircraft test stations with new instruments. The test
programs were all in an derivative of ATLAS, another mil-spec computer
language.

My part was writing the control code from the new instruments, so I
wasn't using the ATLAS directly. However, I had to be familiar with the
test routines and ran lots of them and had to figure out what the
control was trying to do when something didn't work.

At any rate, that also used $ as a line terminator.


Brian

[The Horny Goat]

On Thu, 28 Jul 2022 07:55:20 GMT, Charles Packer <mai...@cpacker.org>
wrote:

Not all that shocking for a language with ALGOL in its ancestry....

[Paul S Person]

John Galt would have been so happy.
--
"In this connexion, unquestionably the most significant
development was the disintegration, under Christian
influence, of classical conceptions of the family and
of family right."

[Scott Lurndal]

FWIW, the Wiki article for SDC (Bought by Burroughs then Loral, then Lockmart,
then L3 and finally Harris) notes they developed Jovial in the '60s.

[Michael F. Stemper]

> On Thu, 28 Jul 2022 22:57:26 -0000 (UTC), "Default User"
> <defaul...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>> Charles Packer wrote:
>>
>>> On Wed, 27 Jul 2022 17:46:36 +0000, Dorothy J Heydt wrote:
>>>
>>>> JOVIAL was, IIRC, developed and used at the Naval Electronics Lab
>>>> on Point Loma, just outside San Diego, CA.
>>>
>>> I checked the Wikipedia article on JOVIAL to confirm this, since
>>> I assumed that the language was developed at SDC's headquarters
>>> in Santa Monica. I found nothing on that, but there is this
>>> oddity: in a code snippet given as an example, the lines are
>>> terminated with semi-colons. When I coded in it between 1968 and
>>> 1976, the lines still had to end with dollar signs.
>>
>> My final years as a productive member of society involved a project to
>> upgrade some aircraft test stations with new instruments. The test
>> programs were all in an derivative of ATLAS, another mil-spec computer
>> language.
>>
>> My part was writing the control code from the new instruments, so I
>> wasn't using the ATLAS directly. However, I had to be familiar with the
>> test routines and ran lots of them and had to figure out what the
>> control was trying to do when something didn't work.
>>
>> At any rate, that also used $ as a line terminator.

I've never heard of this before. Does anybody know if there is a direct
link between this usage and regexes using the "$" meta-character to
match EOL?


--
Michael F. Stemper
I never met a character I didn't like.

[The Horny Goat]

On Fri, 29 Jul 2022 16:29:23 GMT, sc...@slp53.sl.home (Scott Lurndal)
wrote:

>>>I checked the Wikipedia article on JOVIAL to confirm this, since
>>>I assumed that the language was developed at SDC's headquarters
>>>in Santa Monica. I found nothing on that, but there is this
>>>oddity: in a code snippet given as an example, the lines are
>>>terminated with semi-colons. When I coded in it between 1968 and
>>>1976, the lines still had to end with dollar signs.
>>
>>Not all that shocking for a language with ALGOL in its ancestry....
>
>FWIW, the Wiki article for SDC (Bought by Burroughs then Loral, then Lockmart,
>then L3 and finally Harris) notes they developed Jovial in the '60s.

I never tried Jovial but did a fair bit of ALGOL stuff when I was a
coop student for Burroughs in the mid 80s

[J. Clarke]

I deal on a daily basis with Fortran programs written in C. I
remember a frustration filled day when I finally twigged that this
monstrosity I was dealing with was the C implementation of a computed
goto.

[pete...@gmail.com]

On Saturday, August 13, 2022 at 10:43:15 AM UTC-7, J. Clarke wrote:
> On Tue, 26 Jul 2022 17:49:19 GMT, djh...@kithrup.com (Dorothy J
> Heydt) wrote:
>
> >In article <tboq47$lu1$1...@newsreader4.netcologne.de>,
> >Thomas Koenig <tko...@netcologne.de> wrote:
> >>Charles Packer <mai...@cpacker.org> schrieb:
> >>> On Sat, 23 Jul 2022 16:47:24 -0500, Lynn McGuire wrote:
> >>>
> >>>> “50 Years of Landsat”
> >>>> https://wattsupwiththat.com/2022/07/23/50-years-of-landsat/

> >>>> o

> >>>> “We’re celebrating 50 years of the Landsat satellite, the
> >>first of which
> >>>> launched on July 23, 1972. The latest in the series, Landsat 9,
> >>>> launched in September 2021.”
> >>>> https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/landsat/main/index.html
> >>>>
> >>>> Some of NASAs finest technology.
> >>>>
> >>>> Lynn
> >>>
> >>> Landsat-related work comprised a significant part of my programming
> >>> career.
> >>
> >>Are you a Real Programmer, then, with the main languages FORTRAN
> >>and assembler?
> >
> >(Hal Heydt)
> >A Real Programmer can write a FORTRAN program in *any* language.
> >
> >Two other points come to mind... First, which version of
> >FORTRAN. I initially learned FORTRAN II on an IBM 1620 Mod. I
> >(along with SPS II, the assembly language for that machine).
> >
> >When I started out being paid as a programmer, I wrote some quite
> >decent FORTAN programs in COBOL.
> I deal on a daily basis with Fortran programs written in C. I
> remember a frustration filled day when I finally twigged that this
> monstrosity I was dealing with was the C implementation of a computed
> goto.

Function pointers are also an endless delight.

Pt

[Lynn McGuire]

I have computed gotos with over 400 jump labels in them. I have been
wondering about those myself in my ongoing quest to convert to C++.
Although, the GCC compiler supports computed gotos in its own C / C++ code.

Lynn