On Thu, 5 Jun 2008 16:24:18 -0500, William H. Blair wrote: > >Why was it written that way? ...
(paraphrasing) They broke the software to match badly designed hardware. Well, yeah, character generator ROMs were expensive. But the instant dual case appeared, it should have induced a requirement on the software to support it. >very unusual thing. Virtually nobody had a TN train on >their 1403-N1 printer; if you did, your 1100 LPM printer >slowed down to become only a 200 LPM or less printer. No > I'm surprised at a factor of 5. Wouldn't doubling the gamut of characters result in half as many copies of each on the train, and no worse than halve the throughput. But circa 1979 we had a Documation 1403 (or was it 3211) clone. We kept a TN belt on it for proofing documentation. Even so, the printer was busy only 40% of the time, or so. But I recall the dinos clustered around it clucking at how much faster it would print their hexadecimal reports if we didn't need to support the idiosyncrasies of the tech writers. (Open shop operations; swapping print belts for SYSOUT classes would have made throughput even worse for delays for volunteer operator intervention and the reworks of output printed with the wrong belt.) > "Also, lowercase characters are folded to uppercase > characters." > > "The data is folded to uppercase." > >Thus that's just the way it IS, because that's originally >how it WAS. In other words: simply for compatibility with >1970-era programming and I/O equipment. This could have >been (and still could be) changed. Don't hold your breath. > In only a slightly later era I had control of a Pascal RTL. Completely disgusted with folding on input, I modified the OPEN interface to take the DCB exit and stuff the READ routine pointer for terminal devices to my own code that did a TGET with no folding. But why, in the 21st century, is there no "ALLOCATE DSN(*,ASIS)" facility? Someone asked, what program am I using that performs unwanted folding? First, it's not a "program" over which I have much control. Then, I don't know. What "program" is it that presents the "READY" prompt after I log on? Is that what's called the "Terminal Monitor Program"? Or are ALLOCATE, CALL, EXEC, etc. considered individual "programs" in their own right? And which "program" among these is it that's folding my data from DSN(*)? -- gil ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
