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Philadelphia
Walt Mankowski is a recovering ivory tower computer scientist who recently completed a postdoc working with biologists to process and visualize terabytes of 2D and 3D time lapse microscope images. In his past life he spent 10 years as a COBOL programmer at a major cable home shopping network. He enjoys Perl, regular expressions, high-performance computing, and Futurama.
Authored Comments
I began programming in the early 80s on those early PCs. When I was an ivory tower computer scientist, I still had a PC, but it had 32 CPUs, 64 GB of RAM, and terabytes of storage. We were able to work on computational problems that were unthinkable back then. Also programming's already hard enough without having to micromanage memory. While it's fun to look back, it makes me appreciate modern hardware and software even more!
It appears that JCL and some mainframe assemblers used column 72 to indicate continuation, so I guess it's possible some early version of COBOL did as well.