In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Anne & Lynn Wheeler <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > >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).
hmmm...I wonder if a checksum could have been used for an index. It would make a change to any file immediately flagged. The owners of those files would have to be the people who answered the phones. I don't remember how nor who generated our phone books. <snip> >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. WE had similar braindead managers. <ahem> The ones who thought that developers shouldn't have easy access to TTYs came from an IBM card environment. We also had product managers who would promise a customer the first piece of gear off the manufacturing line which makes a marvelous and expensive boat anchor without the software. JMF was supposed to do work on the Alpha. It took them six fucking months to get him a system. When he could no longer burp to talk, he was supposed to get a speech device that would hook up to the laptop. He finally got it almost too late. I talked him into getting a device from Children's Hospital instead. He was able to "speak" by typing at the TTY screen for six months before the DEC speech device was given to him. These idiots missed out on six months of active hardware feedback and software development. But, heaven forbid, that he be allowed to do something useful. /BAH /BAH
