Does any one remember Coral? No, not some GUI paintbrush! Coral 66
maintained much of the British defence and power systems for many years.
Then a leviathan called ADA snuck its proboscis in the door, only to be
outsnucked by an little upstart that didn't even have a proper name -
'C'. (Believe it or not one of my lecturers was a guru in 'B'. yes, you
guessed it, the precursor to 'C'.)
It takes compiled 'C' 65K to print "Hello World". I worked on realtime
Coral systems that maintained the voltage levels on electricity
substations in the UK. Thousands of lines of code (albeit a lot of it in
8080 assembler), squeezed into 48k on a purpose built Ferranti computer.
We were poor in those days - but we were happy:-)
P.S. To all you Pascal affionados (me to). I did my A level computer
science project in Pascal on a 48K ZX Spectrum. I remember buying it on
a cassette tape from the author, who was seling them out of a cardboard
box at a computer fair in London for £5. I'm sure Nicklaus Wirth based
the language on Coral. At a distance (18 inches) its hard to tell them
apart.
---
Regards
Philip Morgan
philip at imageviewer.co.uk
www.imageviewer.co.uk
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