Fran Hensler <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >Phil - >I'm happy to find someone who worked at the University of Waterloo.
>Did you work on any of the great software that Waterloo wrote for >academic use? Like WATFOR, WATFIV, WATBOL, Lisp, Modula-2, WPascal, >WAT-C, Waterloo Basic, Student CMS, and WATFILE? We ran them all. Most of those were from the WATCOM folks, who were a 99.44% separate company. But I worked on Student CMS a lot; we had over 200 local mods to CMS and about the same to CP (including SSI). I had some very nice XEDIT mods, including VARCURL, which made the current line move up and down the screen -- very useful on slow dialup lines. Not very interesting nowadays, on my 15mbit/second cable modem connection! In January 1986 I spent 2 weeks porting the 200 CMS mods to SP4 and then said "OK, I'm done here" and started looking for a vendor job, wound up at VMSG, home of V/FORCE, V/COPY, V/SEG, and friends. >Waterloo really dropped the ball on the marketing of WATFILE. They >had both a CMS and a PC version of this wonderful tool. In many ways >it is superior to Excel. The site license for the CMS version was >reasonably priced but $495 per copy of the PC version was just too >high in the 1980s. No doubt...we had some strong differences of opinion with the WATCOM folks about stuff like this. >I still have copies of the Waterloo VM Modifications tapes. I used >quite a few of the mods. I wrote the software to manage those tapes -- adding a new mod to the tapes used to be a nightmare, but I fixed that. Those were the days! I used to keep a list of our fixes to IBM code, and whenever our list of open PMRs got down to below 5, I'd call the Support Centre and say "I want to open 10 problems" (our PSR had made us agree to only do 10 at a time). "Ten problems?!?!!" they'd always reply. "Well, I have a list of 100 or so, but I'm only reporting 10". "Oh, ok..." ...phsiii (waxing nostalgic)
