Theodore G. Scott

This is an interesting book and was a complete surprise. I was browsing the stacks at Grainger Engineering library at UIUC when this caught my eye. By the title and the wear of the cover, I figured it would be about an early variant of BASIC, perhaps even the original Dartmouth version. However, this predates BASIC by about a decade.

What it is instead, is a kind of choose-your-own-adventure for learning to program decimal machine language on a hypothetical machine called the TUTAC - think a simplified IBM 7070. I wrote a fuller description and an emulator, available at:

https://github.com/mvanmoer/TUTAC

The prose and pedagogy are awful, if you make a wrong choice, you will be chided. I guess this was considered more "teacherly" for the time? However, it did give me my first real sense for how machine language programming actually works.… (més)