Posts by Greum

ALGOL 60 at 60: The greatest computer language you've never used and grandaddy of the programming family tree

I remember learning ALGOL in the late 60s, although I never used it for a real-life task. The only thing I can recall was that, as well as regular quote marks, there was a pair of very large opening and closing quotes which our tutor referred to as George Woodcocks after a trade union leader who had extremely bushy weyebrows.

Britain has no idea how close it came to ATMs flooding the streets with free money thanks to some crap code, 1970s style

Re: Not the only Burroughs ATM story

Ah, yes. The Secure Card Property, a few random iron filings embedded in the card. The idea was to make the card difficult to copy, but it also had the effect that it was difficult to get a consistent reading which resulted in many cards being retained because the SCP value encoded on the card didn't match. One of those failed "good ideas".