Babbage's "Difference Engine"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Babbage
——Which model of CoCo?-—
It had to be model 1.0. It was brand new on the market from Radio Shack and was only available with 4k memory
I had no idea it is still around.
I learned to program in Basic and developed a program on it that actually ran on the model III at the office. It would input the number and length of pieces and calculate the number of 21 ‘ stock lengths of each extrusion required. It was a tremendous benefit for such a mundane calculation.
That was the end of my programming
My young son would devour the Hot Coco magazine and did all sorts of neat stuff.
Babbage's "Difference Engine"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Babbage
I went to a computer programming school in 1966 on an IBM 360. We also had an IBM 1180 that used Fortran. The first job out of school for my buddy was at a feed plant (So. Cal.). The govt had a strict set of ingredients for cattle feed as well as how much of each was allowed. He wrote a program that accepted the latest commodity prices and then figured out what cheapest mix could be formulated and stay with the guidelines. Later he did that for an ice cream maker. That was when it hit me why we were head and shoulders above the rest of the business world.
I worked for the USMC PX at Camp Pendleton then and we had vendors who gave 30-, 60-, 90-days same as cash deals. I wrote a program to pay only the 30-day guys and keep the other monies in an interest-bearing account until the 60- and 90-day bills were due. I thought it was nickel-dime crap, but the accountants told me we saved a bunch of money that way.
I imagine there were a lot of breakthroughs like yours and mine in those days.
And RAINBOW magazine. Mrs p6 and I would spend hours...days...typing in hex code and three times that debugging, to make a smiling pumpkin for our kids for Halloween.
We were so jealous of the C64 that could do sprites....especially at Christmas. The Commodore Chistmas demo still ROCKS! Wish I still had it...