
Flowmatic (1957) [pdf] - brudgers
http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/text/Remington_Rand/Univac.Flowmatic.1957.102646140.pdf
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mceachen
From [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLOW-
MATIC](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLOW-MATIC) :

 _FLOW-MATIC, originally known as B-0 (Business Language version 0), was the
first English-like data processing language. It was developed for the UNIVAC I
at Remington Rand under Grace Hopper during the period from 1955 until 1959.
It had a strong influence on the development of COBOL._

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hasenj
I don't know if it's just me but I just find the graphic design here
impressive. It's indistinguishable from modern/current design.

~~~
nerdponx
Really? It looks dated to me. The colors, the typefaces, and the illustrations
are very "midcentury".

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SwellJoe
I have a strong feeling that people of a certain age (say, born in the 70s)
associate this kind of design with oldness, while younger generations have had
little to no contact with it except in retro inspired modern design.

So, paradoxically perhaps, the older you are the older this kind of design
looks. I'm of the age where it reminds me of old magazines and ads and stuff,
so I see where you're coming from. _But_ , I've also noticed that this kind of
design has seen a massive resurgence in many areas of design. Mid-century
modern furniture, interior design, etc. is all the rage these days. Many very
modern companies and projects (the already mentioned Atom project being an
obvious one) are using these kinds of design elements. Atomic and space
iconography, subdued warm solid colors, non-traditional quirky (but simple and
still quite readable) typefaces, etc.

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detaro
I think that's it. The PDF clearly looks dated to me, but I think it's only
some slight updates away from being something that could be produced today.
(Different colors, clearer lines (which here probably is primarily limits of
print and scan), slightly different fonts and typography)

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csours
Imagine living back at this time, and seeing the advancement of computers.
It's not hard to imagine that natural language programming and real artificial
intelligence would not be far off. Science fiction of the period had entire
economies planned and administered by computer.

Of course, that didn't happen, but it gets me thinking about what we imagine
won't be far off from today. For myself, I imagine ubiquitous implanted health
monitors and advanced computer/brain direct interfaces.

What do you imagine we will see "just around the corner"?

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pjmlp
Bret Victor has a wonderful talk (The future of programming), where he
pretends to be in the 60's with all the research going on with Lisp, Algol,
Fortran, and looking towards the future.

Needless to say, none of the positive predictions turned out as expected.

~~~
csours
I wonder how many of these didn't work out because they didn't scale well to
real world complexity.

~~~
pjmlp
The reasons are more to do with political interests and willingness to invest
into specific technologies.

For example, do you think the whole Web 2.0 with JavaScript everywhere would
ever taken off if it wasn't for companies with the engineering resources of
Microsoft, Google, Apple and Mozilla into fighting for JIT performance?

Without it, JavaScript would still be used for form validations and dummy page
animations.

Or Java on Android, with Google's goal of making it succeed whatever it takes.

It is all a matter how much money a company is willing to spend into making
something become reality.

~~~
jacobush
No, not really, at all. Natural language programming and strong A.I. are
vastly different than the Node.js framework of the week. These things you
mention, Javascript, Java, Android etc are like toys. You argue that the toy
makers just as easily could have produced the equivalent of a Moon rocket
program, if only they had spent money on that.

I am not convinced.

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JorgeGT
If anyone is wondering, the UNIVAC scientific system pictured at the end was
able to hold the impressive capacity of ~55 kB of RAM:
[http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/text/Remington_...](http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/text/Remington_Rand/SperryRand.Univac.1957.102646141.pdf)

~~~
Someone
12*1024 36-bits words, max, so exactly the same number of bits as in 54 kB.
Clock frequency was 125kHz, it seems.

The drum stored 288MB.

Edit: under "Some Applications", the first item listed is "Missiles". That
shows where the money was.

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lisper
> The drum stored 288MB.

Where did you get that number? It seems awfully high for 1957.

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nik61
The text makes it clear that capacity of the drum was 16384 12 bit "words",
196608 bits in total. The use of core memory was a big advance at that time.
Previously the drums had been the main memory for that generation of machines,
with optimal placement of code on the drum being seen as a major programming
skill.

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dungle6
The words are 36 bits. 3 12 bit characters (the analogue to a byte)

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jonsen
Wikipedia: "The size of the byte has historically been hardware dependent and
no definitive standards existed that mandated the size – byte-sizes from 1[3]
to 48 bits[4] are known to have been used in the past."

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rst
Shame it's the brochure and not the manual. (The sample program is incomplete,
missing data declarations --these were in a separate DIRECTORY section, but
info on its syntax is ... scarce.)

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krylon
In retrospect, Flowmatic is a really cool name for a programming language.

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the-dude
It is from the time centrifuges ( washing appliance ) were called Turn-o-
matics.

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krylon
I guess I _do_ learn something new every day.

Thanks!

