GnarfGnarf

The company started out with RPG. There was no COBOL compiler. They had to start processing health claims on paper tape, which could only be read with Assembler. They hired me to learn & write Assembler. We converted the master file update (40,000 cards, two hours twice a day) to Assembler, when I discovered a way to store 240 digits per card: twelve bits/column = three decimal digits. It was the 70's (7 = 0111), so our cards looked like lace doilies. Reconstructing jammed cards was fun.

I left the company after three years because I could only compile & test at night or on weekends.

The Assembler (Basic Assembler Language or BAL) was for the Univac 9300 and 9400, clones of the IBM 360. Univac originally made and sold the 1100 series, with the Exec 8 O/S. The 1100 was a 36-bit machine, very successful in airline reservation systems, petroleum exploration, etc. but it was incompatible with IBM's 360 architecture. Univac developed the 9000 so IBM customers could easily convert.

The 9300 I programmed had 32K, tape drives, card reader & punch. It ran NCOS (Non-Concurrent OS). It had no virtual memory, so we had to write our own "overlays", sections of code that were loaded at beginning and end of a run, for initialization and wrapping up. No console, just sixteen lights to display error numbers, and eight butterfly switches for writing directly to memory.

Imagine running an insurance company on 32K!

I was a Systems Analyst. I helped salesmen prepare proposals, I did benchmarks and conversions, and customer training. Univac couldn't afford to put a computer in every branch, so I had less access and opportunity to program, than our customers. Made support awkward.

We also had internal competition and friction. The 9000 and 1100 teams resented if their technology was not pitched to a prospective customer. The 9000 was lower-end than 1100, but there was enough overlap in the mid-range.

I also programmed the CADE 1900, a data entry system that paid for many trips throughout Canada and the U.S.

Before that, I wrote apps in IBM mainframe Assembler for a life insurance company.

(Sorry I didn't reply sooner, I had not seen the question).

I should have loved Latin. I should have loved Greek.

I worked for Sperry Univac 1974/78. Great bunch of people. It’s a shame their resources were diluted over so many different operating systems.

What, you rewrote std::deque? Whew!

It’s heartbreaking to think of what treasures were lost when they were using mummies as locomotive fuel in the 19th century.

Perhaps, but municipal water runs by gravity whereas your well pump doesn’t operate during a power failure.

SBC = Single Board Computing Betriebsblind

Agree. I love UDLs, use them in my code for improved legibility. I hadn’t realized how badly you can screw up if you don’t define all the operators correctly.

I thought User-Defined Literals were a great idea until I saw all the pitfalls listed in the Google style document. Dangerous indeed.

The UK was not part of the Euro economy.

I'm a Windows/macOS developer, but I strongly feel that all national governments need to convert to Linux, for strategic sovereignty.

(My customer demographic is seniors & casual users).

I'm a Windows/macOS developer, but I strongly feel that all national governments need to convert to Linux, for strategic sovereignty. I'm sure Microsoft, under orders from the U.S. government, could disable all computers in any country or organization, at the flick of a switch.

Imagine how Open Source Software could improve if a consortium of nations put their money and resources into commissioning bug fixes and enhancements, which would be of collective benefit.

Apart from a few niche cases, the needs of most government bureaucracies would be well served by currently available OSS word processing, spreadsheet, presentation and graphics software.

Qt has many good features, but it is not as robust as Visual Studio. It can lock up while debugging. <F2> will take you to the extern in the same module, not the actual definition. Variable expansion during debugging is slow. You can’t display a.b.c, you have to expand all of ‘a’, then all of ‘a.b’

Totally describes my experience, since 1965.

I appreciate how lower-case ‘L’, digit ‘1’ and upper-case ‘I’ are differentiated. Also alpha ‘O’ and zero.

CI = Continuous Integration

There are three things a nation needs to accept about universal health care:

(1) It’s expensive (2) Everybody has to pay (3) The government’s gotta run it

The WiX installer is a byzantine incomprehensible mess. Its only appeal was that it was free. If I have to pay, I'd rather have a commercial product that is supported and easier to use.

Rob Mensching was supposed to monetize WiX by offering $5,000/yr enterprise consulting & support services. I guess that's not enough.

What makes the author think we are entitled to free search? How much would you pay for ad-free search? The “golden era” of free search was just setting us up for the plucking.

Would this also apply to a vendor’s encrypted file format?

There would be a broader area affected.

Yeah, SPF, DKIM and DMARC are incomprehensible. The only people with the time, motivation and expertise to understand and apply them, are professional spammers. Most of the legitimate email I get, fail one or more of these tests.

If I recall, SPF limits the number of domains you can enumerate in your DNS records.

I write a genealogy app (family history). Recursion is the foundation of the code, and permeates everywhere. The call stack can go 200 deep or more (~4,000 yrs). The code has been successfully running on millions of desktops for thirty years, and has never caused a crash or infinite loop because of recursion.

The secret is to check at every step that there is no "he's his own grandpa" loops in the user's tree, where (s)he inadvertently makes one of a person's descendants, also his ancestor. This happens sometimes because re-using the same names can cause confusion.

Recursion is like magic :o)

It is possible to store three decimal digits as three groups of four bits, in every 12-row column.

You can insert and delete when duplicating cards, by pressing with your fingers on the source or target card while typing on the keyboard.

This is about the root of humanity’s problem: the inability to avoid misusing knowledge and technology. All our inventions are but improved means to an unimproved end (Thoreau)

The car should have an option to stop, let the passenger & baggage out, then resume its search for a parking spot. Or leave altogether since it no longer needs to be in the airport parking lot.

Still, typical of poorly designed software.

There were real bugs and there was a real possibility of major disruption. We were spared because of mobilization of resources and the dedication of the programmers involved.

I did this for a while. I found a roll of heavy-duty aluminum foil (not quite pie-plate thick), and scavenged some old dot-matrix printers. Removing the ribbon, I printed text and low-res images on the foil. I inserted a roll containing my father's biography in the ashes of his funeral urn. Should be readable by archaeologists centuries from now.