The realities Joel Ewing describes needed to be rehearsed for those who did not live through them. I do think, however, that the culture was at least as influential as the technology.
Things were different in other, non-IBM cultures. I remember, for example, being struck many, many years ago by the fact that the MULTICS source programs I saw at MIT, mostly PL/I and a very little assembler, were being written all but entirely in lower case. More recently, last month in fact, I chided a poster on the IBM Assembler (HLASM) list about his exclusive use of majuscules in source programs; and his disarming response was that "old habits die hard". There were also seldom acknowledged costs associated with the use of exclusively majuscule line-printer output. This output, deemed suitable for accounting clerks, was frequently judged entirely unsuitable for people of more exalted rank; and it was often reprocessed to put it into more 'civilized' formats for upper management. Mixed-case trains have been available for a long time, and I do not find the (entirely correct) argument that they were slower compelling, although I should certainly concede that operations people found it convenient not to have to change chains/trains. It would have been better to medicate the diarrhea of printed output that characterized those times than to focus on the putative economies of majuscules-only output. John Gilmore, Ashland, MA 01721 - USA ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
