<be forewarned, this may be considered long, or very long by some> _________________________________________________________________________
Jose J. Ortiz-Carlo on Sun Mar 2 00:30:26 PST 2003 wrote: > Welcome aboard. Have fun!! :) Thanks for the welcome Jose, muchas gracias. Krajo que este sitio es bien activo :-) _________________________________________________________________________ J. van Baardwijk on Sun Mar 2 16:28:56 PST 2003 wrote: > Hello to you too, and welcome on board! :-) > > Care to tell us a bit more about you? You know, "getting to know you" and > stuff like that. :-) [...snip part of message...] > All that should give you some idea of what you're getting yourself > into... <GRIN> Thanks to you too Jeroen, heel hartelijk bedankt. Deze plaats is verdommed bezig! duui! BTW, I did check out the websites you gave me, pretty cool! I will go back. _________________________________________________________________________ I'm having a hell of a time keeping up with just this thread, but one of the best posts I saw was by The Fool on Wed Feb 26 21:15:34 PST 2003 when he wrote a most amusing description of most languages, it's a keeper! If I ever make to Norfolk (unless he's in some other city), I'll have to give him a call. _________________________________________________________________________ Now to answer Jeroen's request. I did start off wiring control panels when machines were still called "hard iron", they had crankshafts, relays, the printing mechanism was typebars that lifted up and down and stopped when the character read through a punched card read by brushes making contact with a copper roller. The old saying about you dropping a tray of cards really screwed up your day was true because you would have had to sort the cards and seaprate them into different groups, i.e., "master card" -- contains name and address, "balance card" -- contains your previous day's bank balance and "detail cards" -- the checks and or deposits you made during the day. So we had a "sorter" (082, 083, 084 -- each more sofisticaded and faster than the previos one), it's function is self-evident. We had a "collator" (077) where you had two (2) hoppers -- where you put cards in. So one hopper would have the "master cards" and the other would have the "balance card" and what the machine would do is place the "master card" ahead of the "balance card". So far it sounds easy enough but consider, sometimes the amount of information for a "master card" would span the 80 columns available so you would have two (2) "master cards" that had to go ahead of the "balance card". Then you placed the merged cards into one hopper and the "detail cards" into the other so that in the end you would have name, balance and daily transactions in sequence ready to go to the "tabulator". <getting bored by now? I hope not, this _is_ history!> The "tabulator" (402, 407, 421, etc.) were machines that took these merged cards and actually printed invoices, bank statements, and et al. business accounting systems. They were usually connected to a "reproducing punch" (514, 519) machine by a huge cable about 2 in. thick and punched the new "balance card" for use the next evening. They were also used of course to "reproduce" cards whenever they would wear out. There were "calculators" (602 -- completely mechanical, 604 -- had tubes) that would read a card and perform i.e. interest calculations and punch the result on the same card. Let me not forget "punch machines" (024, 026 -- actually printed the contents of the card on top of the card, 029 -- a bit more modern) and there used to be rooms filled with these machines -- usually 10 - 100, depending on the size of the business. This was where all paper was transcribed to data cards. <I hope you're still with me, although they didn't know it then they were already subjected to something similar to Moore's Law -- this is 1965 I'm describing, that's when I started repairing the dastardly things. Imagine a bug on one of these things could actually be a rat that had gotten caught in the gears of the machine> Computers, ...OK my first machine was a 1401 and it had 4K of memory, that's right, only 4K. That's where we ran Accounts Payable, A/R, Payroll and all accounting functions. These machines had the doughnut "core" for memory and while learning to program them, we actually did map out memory into segments where data was going to be stored and the areas where the instructions were going to be placed. Even today each byte has an associated address. These machines also came with -- "oooh joy" -- three (3) index registers. Then they made Autocoder available (pretty much the same as Assembler) and that made the programming job a whole lot easier. Remember there was no operating system, so you had to write your own I/O routines and the Channel Commands associated (peripherals had a whole different set of instructions and still do.) 1440 and 1410 were other machines using the same architecture and the 70x, 70xx, were a different breed made for scientific purposes (never had anything to do with those). <skipping a whole bunch in the scientific area> But then came the 360's (fixing these was a blast, upgrades even better, imagine incresing the memory for one these machines from 64K to 128K cost the customer approximately $500,000). The beauty of these systems was that they did have operating systems, the early DOS, MVS (it wasn't called that), the telecommunications BTAM, QTAM, etc. came to life. Having a 300 baud modem was lightning speed! ...and then the 370's...that's when I quit hardware support, no control over where you placed your oscilloscope probe. OK, let's fast forward a bit. I became software support for the 1st version of CICS (this is quiz question -- see if anyone knows what it means :-) and eventually went through the paces of DOS, MVS and VM in it's multiple flavours, (AIX, OS/2, etc. towards the end of my stay at IBM). Became a Systems Engineer, Sales Rep., Product Planner for SQL/DS, worked with early "natural language", "knowledge based system" products, and then retired from IBM (in South America, Caribeean, Europe, USA and Canada) ...enough, I'm tired and if you've stuck with me this far, ...thanks! _________________________________________________________________________ My opinion on languages. They all have/had a time and place for their use. I would never compare APL to COBOL, although in my career I have seen APL used to shorten the development cycle from 2-3 months to just 2 weeks. You have to be able to speak "greek" :-) and think "matrix". I would never compare PROLOG to BASIC, the first is a declarative language and the latter a procedural one. Again thinking style is different. We could not say that "Relational Databases" are better than "Hierarchical databases" -- IMS served it's purpose very well when "System R" was still under development in California. Object Oriented programming has now been overshadowed by other paradigms and this only confirms that old adage "the only constant in the universe is change". Cheers! (...please be gentle and don't flame me!) -- Han Tacoma ~ Artificial Intelligence is better than none! ~ _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
