Ohmygawd, what have I started????
To you newbies and Windows users, this an inside joke. Please bear
with us. There was a time (before the www) when it was estimated over
half the traffic on the internet was flame wars over editors. Hey,
geeks don't watch sports, but that doesn't mean....
Since the arrival of AOL, the major traffic has been pornography,
a much healthier pastime, IMHO.
My vote goes to microemacs, which came with the Amiga. Nice GUI,
slim and trim (my Amiga came with twice the standard ROM - 2MB!
I spent $450 for an 8MB card and felt really cool.). It won't
play chess and beat Deep Blue, but that's okay, Kasparov keeps
declining my dinner invitations. :)
While on Memory Lane, I found this looking for old job references:
> John Dierdorf Schrieb:
> I worked on the Safeguard software from 1969 to 1975 [...]
>
> Almost all of it was written in assembly language -- at the time the
> largest programming project ever written -- maybe 4,000 man-years.
> (It came in on time, on budget, and on spec, and there aren't very
> many programming projects of ANY size that did that! And as far as we
> knew it would have worked perfectly against the threat it was designed
> for, ten years before! <grin>)
>
> The reason for ass'y was simply for speed. As I've told a lot of my
> programming projects, the design goal was, "If we can shave another
> micro-second out of an inner loop, then we can keep 652 balls in the
> air at one time instead of 651. Hey! Now we can save Pittsburgh!"
> Many of the inner "loops" were NOT, in fact loops, but were written
> out linearly for speed. (ANY tradeoff of memory for speed was
> legitimate - I can remember design-change meetings where the proposal
> was to save a millisecond.)
Did you know we STILL have no credible incoming missile defense?
I think it's time to take away the toys.
Sandi
PS: Before anyone asks, I'm still not at liberty to say. :)
"I have not yet begun to code!"
[EMAIL PROTECTED] blades.inetsolve.com 3333
