interesting Univac ad from 1956

[Don Shepherd]

(06-06-2014 01:22 AM)davetheguru Wrote:  the whole partition of RAM printed out in hex

Or octal on the Univac 1108, a 36-bit machine. You had a runstream card (JCL to IBM'ers) to generate a postmortem memory dump only if the program aborted, no sense in wasting all that paper otherwise. It had some trace-back features so that if you had a long listing of your FORTRAN program that showed the Sleuth code or assembler, you could find the offending source line without too much work.

Or you could just be a very careful programmer and avoid errors like this!

The relatively primitive debugging abilities of the system did encourage good programming habits, including the infamous "desk checking", which nobody does anymore I'm afraid.