To be a Programmer... without mathematics?

Cats on MEDICID-1

One of the most fantastic things about having a computer in our department in the 70's is that we could do with it what we wanted, literally, without having to go through all the bureaucracy created around the so-called "Calculation Centers", where weeks and even months passed between having an idea and getting a real program to implement it. In other words, we lived through the personal computer revolution years before it even existed.In those years a young researcher, the current...

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Speaking of robots in 1977.

One afternoon of the many in which the programs we developed took hours and even days to produce results, several colleagues were meeting near our computer and the topic of robots came up.Some of us talked about the distance between the human being and the automation of processes by computers, which by the way is currently maintained, others about the development of Neuroscience itself, others the development of mathematics and computing itself, in short, almost any topic fit into...

Pedro Valdés from Neuro found me... and I was looking for the same thing!

I will tell how I started working in the Department of Neurophysiology of the National Center for Scientific Research. It was the year 1971 and I was studying Pure Mathematics at the University and it turns out that a doctor, Dr. Pedro Valdés Sosa, better known as "Peter", also began to study Mathematics as a second career. Peter and I were together for almost two years, we became good friends, we even studied together. Peter was already a worker with many obligations, he skippe...

My fellow operators.

{loadmoduleid 135} In other articles I have commented that in the 70s our Neuroscience department had a CID-201-B minicomputer compatible with the PDP-8 of the DEC company and that the CID-201-B had only a typewriter teletype, a perforated paper tape reader, and a paper tape printer.In order to use this equipment, after developing and fine-tuning each program, it was necessary to "punch" the tapes with the data, or, for example, use the CONCATISO program (see article) to convert t...

Single link Cluster Analysis and Peter Valdes.

At the beginning of the 70s we had a computer with 32 Kilowords and 12 bits in length each word and to program it encoded the machine language by hand and could also use a posfix notation language called LEAL although it was difficult for us anyway to translate algorithms especially if what prevailed was the calculation, so frequent in the Neuroscience applications that we developed supported by statistics, including multivariate ones.In those years and also in the 60's, it was com...

Program and fine-tune in assembler binary

It was the years 1973, 1974,...In the article on "CONCATISO my first program" I described in broad strokes the characteristics of the computer CID-201-B compatible with the PDP-8 of the DEC company.Recall that it was 12 bits long, but also only had a 12-bit accumulator register and 1 carry bit.Machine language instructions were encoded in those 12 bits where sometimes another word was used to access groups of 4096 (12 bits) memory words, and thus be able to access all 32 Kilowords...

With Variables everything, without Variables nothing.

I have said on many occasions and in various audiences that what we call variables in Programming is what frontally separates Mathematics and its language from Programming and the problems it solves.It is that it is well known that a mathematical variable is like a being without a name, which can be called X, Y, or Z interchangeably and the meaning of the mathematical formulas where it appears does not change. Also the mathematical variable is like a being without its own personali...

Spreadsheets as a universal programming model.

Any two-dimensional screen can be viewed as a collection of rectangular cells. A point and even the entire screen can be defined as such.Almost all cell phones and computer screens are two-dimensional screens.Therefore, anything that runs on mobile phones or PCs or Macs is viewed on a two-dimensional screen as a collection of rectangular cells.In conclusion, anything that runs on mobile phones or PC or Mac can be conceived as a spreadsheet both practically and theoretically.Spreads...

Microsoft Access as a database is limited by design and what to do.

As the title indicates, the microsoft office database product, Microsoft Access, is limited by the company itself so that it does not compete with other products such as SQL Server and C# program development, for example.I explain:The first limitation is the commercial one. Access is not sold alone, but as part of Microsoft Office and therefore an application made in Access cannot be distributed without first verifying that the customer has a valid license of the same Office as suc...

How I became Section Chief of the Computing Center.

It was the early 70's and as I have commented in other articles, our Neuroscience Department had a 12-bit 32 Kilo Words computer, a punched tape reader and an extended typewriter to punch tapes.In those days, computers were scarce, very scarce, and that meant that their use as such was in the hands of large ministries or large companies, but it was very rare for a small department to have one. The self-sacrificing work of the Department staff that prior to my entry into it and usin...

To Galita

Galita's life cycle is over, a cute little dog that my daughter Lissi picked up from the street and who gave us a lot of love and happiness.Galita was very naughty. Being at home made Dolly, another bigger dog, dump the garbage can so that she would then be the one digging for food. And that we gave her a lot of food and other things that she liked. But it seems that her nomadic life led her to try to store as much food as she could find.Galita got along with everyone. She was very sociable. I d...

Spreadsheets are limited because... and serious errors can occur.

It is known to all that the use of Spreadsheets, such as the current Excel, since the beginning when VisiCalc appeared in 1979, have allowed many users without programming knowledge to be able to develop many and varied applications.In particular, the world of economics has been empowered by Spreadsheets. An accountant can directly carry out all or almost all of his work using them, since from the beginning they were conceived with a varied communication with other data processing...

Do you want to stop Windows 10 updates?

As it will have happened to all of you that for years Microsoft has imposed its Windows 10 updates above any personal or business consideration of those who have bought its product.And let's not say that they are only critical and security updates, along the way it has already imposed more than five versions of Windows 10 associated with the "continuous update" system that they implemented as a universal solution to the problems of Windows 10 itself.Well, along the way there have b...

How I learned Neurosciences... with Björn Holmgren and Ruth Urbá.

Since my arrival at the Department of Neurosciences I noticed that the branch of Neuro Biochemistry was, as I say, very well represented by the brilliant Swedish researcher Björn Holmgren and his wife, the talented Chilean Ruth Urbá.In almost home-like conditions, since in fact we were working in what was known at the time as "The Laboratory House", they carried out intense research using mice as an experimental basis, and their contributions to the study of sleep and its physiolog...

The MEDICID-1. The great little equipment.

It was 1974 and an Engineer from the Department of Neurophysiology named Alberto Caro had designed a device for the experimental work of the department that could be controlled by our CID-201-B computer, compatible with the PDP-8, which I referred to in the article "CONCATISO. My first program.".Due to production priorities, the Central Institute for Digital Research (ICID) did not give us what would later be named as MEDICID-2 and for that reason, with great inventiveness, the eng...