On Wed, Dec 11, 2013 at 8:42 PM, Roy Smith <[email protected]> wrote: > In article <[email protected]>, > rusi <[email protected]> wrote: > >> Kernighan and Ritchie set an important "first" in our field by making >> "Hello World" their first program. > > Yup. > >> People tend to under-estimate the importance of this: >> Many assumptions need to be verified/truthified/dovetailed >> starting from switching on the machine onwards for this to work. > > At the time that they wrote it, very few people who used computers ever > got anywhere near the power switch :-)
Nope. Long before that I was working on computers that didn't boot when you powered them up, You had to manually key in a bootstrap program from the front panel switches. (And no, this is not a takeoff of the Four Yorkshiremen sketch.) -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
