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Comment by sohkamyung | Hacker News Reader

Does this part from the memoriam sound correct? That it needed her three days to hand toggle a program on to a computer?

In early 1955, the company was working on a digital computer, the Sperry Electronic Digital Automatic Computer (SPEEDAC) and asked Sammet to be their programmer. Her first task was to write the basic loader for the SPEEDAC, which was a 20-line program that took three days to toggle into the computer by hand in binary.

This [1] appears to be the source for that.

[1] "Jean Sammet: Programming Language Contributor and Historian, and ACM President" (PDF) [ http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?reload=true&arnum... ]

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Yes, I was wondering about this too. I also tracked this down to the IEEE article but it unfortunately has no other detail. I find it hard to conceive that a 20-line program would take three days to toggle into a computer, even if each line expanded to several words of computer memory.

Here's some speculation, though. The SPEEDAC had 4096 18-bit words. [1] If one were able to toggle manually at a rate of one bit per second, it would take over 20 hours of toggling to fill memory. If you add time to recheck values, set addresses correctly, and so forth, it's quite plausible that loading a large program would take three full eight-hour workdays.

An automatic loader would thus save the three days it would have taken to toggle in a program that filled memory. Again, this is just my speculation. But regardless, it's a remarkable achievement.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPEEDAC

That definitely sounds plausible for a very early computer, yep. Hand toggling, in this case, meant literally loading code probably bit by bit (byte by byte if you were lucky) with switches. Very error prone.

It depends on what exactly those 20 lines contained, but it does sound a little exaggerated to me --- perhaps 3 days to actually develop that program (including learning about the machine and its architecture) seems more reasonable.

The first microcomputers in the 70s also require bootstrapping from manually entering code, and it usually didn't take days to do that: http://oldcomputers.net/altair-8800.html

(I was going to make a joke about APL, but then realised this was before its invention...)

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