On Wed, Feb 17, 2010 at 07:21:31PM -0500, Gabe Goldberg wrote:
> From: Gabe Goldberg <[email protected]>
> Subject: End of an era
> To: [email protected]
>
> Mike Cowlishaw, developer of the REXX language, author of several books, ...
<OT REXX>
in the dark ages (before linux) I was co/author of a package which
was used by a large german publishing house to look after their
Data-Center equipment in terms of inventory, costs, and
"how-many what's do we have where".
One of the interesting things was that the source package had to
run natively on VM/CMS, OS/2 and in the DOS-Box of WfW 3.11, so creating
a roll-your-own spreadsheet in REXX became the text-adventure of choice.
(Not everybody had spreadsheets in those days and those that did weren't
all that compatible, so you can see just how far we've come in all these
years;-)
Up till then people had been entering items like:
Quantity ModNr Descr Price-in-USD
======== ===== ===== ============
100 Modem 9600n81 999.999
50 3278M5 Term 999.999
10 3770 Disk 999.999
1 3420 Tape 999.999
This worked surprisingly well for several Fiscal Quarters in several
countries and on several platforms until one of the bigger outfits
decided to report their newest toy which they had bought used
from somewhere. It was a 3390 Model E600, but to make it fit into
the columns they had tried to call it a 3390E600.
They called me up in their early evening and complained that "your
<deleted> software says that this thing is too <deleted> expensive -
too much value or something - and that's just plain wrong. It was a
bargain at the price, says the boss, so you go fix your <deleted>
software."
It took us a while to realise that the problem was neither the price not
the total, but that the value of the ModNr-variable becoming 3090E600
was blowing the top off the the size of the largest expressible integer
taken to the power of 600.
So the moral of the <OT> story is ...
Computers don't do what you want, they do what you tell them to do.
</OT REXX>
@Mike - thanks
//rhi - back to lurking
--
Unix: "Your gun", "Your bullet", "Your foot" BUT "Your choice".
M$-CE/ME/NT: Same as Unix, BUT: "No choice", AND "We Aim Higher".
----------------------------------------------------------------------
For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions,
send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit
http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390
