Anne & Lynn Wheeler <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> the end of the tag field. in any case, after some years, I did a
> VMSG-clone implemented in REXX and XEDIT. Later, I added SMTP/RFC822
> input/output processing.

for even more drift ... early on I was doing all this email stuff.
I had a 15,000 entry nickname file that eventually grew to over
25,000. I was doing a lot of early online telephone book stuff
(which was also borrowed by the PROFs group).

Jim Gray and I (and others) were sitting around drinking one
friday night (before he left for tandem) ... back in the days
of system/r (original relational/sql)
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#systemr

talking about what silver-bullet application could we come up with
that would tempt a lot of non-computer literate employees to start
using online computing (besides the quickly emerging email
application) ...  and came up with the idea of a highly efficient
online corporate telephone book. so the ground rules were two fold
... it had to be blazingly fast, the application had to take less than
one-week to implement and the administration processing gorp for
keeping all the data up-to-date and distributing it ... had to take
less than one-person day per month.

so the online phone book routine used radix search on sorted cms files
... which gave a noticeable improvement over binary search (we
actually calcualted letter frequency distribution for names and used
that for a modified radix search).

so what does this have to do with implementing a vmsg-clone in rexx &
xedit? well default vmsg was to do sequential scan of nickname files
... and this was starting to be somewhat more time-consuming when you
had a 25,000 entry nickname file (which was much smallter than the
aggregate number of entries in the collected online corporate
telephone directories). so a trivial addition to vmsg-clone
implemented in rexx ... was to do a modified radix-search ... similar
to the implementation done for the corporate telephone directories.

misc. past posts mentioning the online telephone directories and/or
modified radix search (using calculate letter frequency):
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/94.html#31 High Speed Data Transport (HSDT)
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001c.html#88 Unix hard links
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002e.html#33 Mainframers: Take back the light
(spotlight, that is)
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004c.html#0 A POX on you, Dennis Ritchie!!!
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004p.html#13 Mainframe Virus ????
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005c.html#38 [Lit.] Buffer overruns
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005c.html#43 History of performance counters
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005s.html#3 Flat Query
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005s.html#4 Flat Query

this helped contribute to a different problem. at the time, there was
supposedly an issue with the availability of 3270 terminals ... and
there was requirement for division vp sign-off for internal 3270
requests and associated delays could be six months. there was this
point in time when middle-management discovered that higher level
executives were starting to use online email ... and all of a
suddened, every middle manager in the company seemed to demand an
immediate 3270 terminal on their desk. this, in turn, pre-empted the
whole six month 3270 terminal provisioning process for those
programmers that actually needed 3270 for things like development
(effectively six months of internal 3270 terminal deliveries were
pre-empted).

to help breakup that log-jam, we put together a business analysis that
3-year fully depreciated 3270 capital costs turned out to be less than
monthly phone expense ... and nobody was suggesting that it should
require division vp approval whether an employee got a phone on their
desk or not.

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler | http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/

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