In 1969-70 I was at the U of Ills where I met a DEC PDP-8. Would change my career path.
Ran my Doctoral Dissertation data analyses on an IBM 360/40 in 1970 at Cal Poly SLO. Fun days. On 8/23/2017 6:01 AM, Rich Shepard wrote: > On Tue, 22 Aug 2017, Alan wrote: > >> Sometimes a rewrite is a useful and needed thing. > Thanks, Alan, for allowing us to share our obscure bug experiences on this > thread. :-) > > In grad school in 1972 I wrote an ecosystem ecological energy flow model > in FORTRAN IV to run on the U. of Illinois' IBM S/360. It used more than a > whole box of 80-column Hollerith cards for input. When it ran it produed > incorrect results, but only the same 2 or 3 wrong answers each time. So I > printed the source code listing on the wide green-bar paper that all the > line printers used. The output was about 1 inch thick. > > I carefully examined each line of code multiple times without seeing the > error. Finally, I took the printed listing to the computer center's help > desk. They examined it without finding the problem. > > One day, strictly by chance while looking at a new printed copy (likely > done on a printer with a newer ribbon) I saw the error jump up and bite me > on the nose. > > Instead of a loop index written as FOR I = 1 TO N I had mistyped it as FOR > 1 = 1 TO N. Distinguishing 1 from the uppercase I was difficult and, because > all of us expected to see I and not 1 in that position we all overlooked it. > > Haven't forgotten this after all these years. > > Rich > _______________________________________________ > PLUG mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
