It was, in fact, my last and only computer course. Subsequently, I was gizmoless until the mid 1980s when I got my 2 floppy zenith 8088 laptop which, shortly thereafter, got an upgrade (out with one floppy and in with a 10mb hard drive, innovation at its best) and a few years later it got a 20mb one instead ...thence I remained (with an office box to match for a time) and finally gave in and got a TI laptop with win3.1 (a great little machine with the best keyboard I have ever owned and quickly got the free win95 upgrade ...good thing cuz 3.1 was no fun) ...went on with that to the last straw and now have my dell 4400 winxphome machine from 2002 (was originally a 4300 but it failed in 1st week and they ran outa them so they sent a 4400 instead) ...which I still use primarily for everything (and my trusty thinkpad x31 winxppro ...great little machine) ...all this to tell you I am surely not an early adopter ...likely a good thing ... (missed win98, 2000, millennium, vista, linux, and likely 7 too!!) wow!
-----Original Message----- From: Fred Holmes [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Saturday, December 26, 2009 1:06 PM Subject: Re: AAAHH, the old days It always struck me that any attempt to alphabetize names, especially ones that were written "full" (so that the machine had to determine what part of the seven-word name was the last (family) name, and what part was the middle name, etc.) would be doomed to failure. I just used an extra column in the spreadsheet (field in the database) to enter a "faux" string that would be used for alphabetization. If the alphabetization string failed to perform as expected, it was simply modified. The column / field would usually be non-printing in any printout of the list. Fred Holmes At 12:04 PM 12/26/2009, rleesimon wrote: >Yes, in 1965-66 as an undergraduate I took a computer course at NYU which >comprised learned to program (entry level, PL-1) and my assigned project was >writing a routine to alphabetize a list of names including all variants >(multiple first, middle names, hyphenated, with degrees, etc.) ...which took >a whole semester and didn't actually function for all variants in the end. >The horrible input was standing around waiting to sit at a punch card >machine (do you hear hangin'chads?) and then wait months for an opening to >run the thing with your stack of cards (a shoebox-full) at 2am when you were >called to do it. Yes, it occupied an entire floor of the building with a/c >trailers outside as well. I seem to recall the model IBM 360/30 and there >were disk drives and all kinds of stuff in there (a clean room, remember >"bugs" ??) ************************************************************************* ** List info, subscription management, list rules, archives, privacy ** ** policy, calmness, a member map, and more at http://www.cguys.org/ ** ************************************************************************* ************************************************************************* ** List info, subscription management, list rules, archives, privacy ** ** policy, calmness, a member map, and more at http://www.cguys.org/ ** *************************************************************************
