Les wrote:
On Tue, 2008-04-01 at 20:36 -0700, Richard England wrote:
BRUCE STANLEY wrote:
*/Tim <ignored_mailbox@xxxxxxxxxxxx>/* wrote:
Tim:
>> have the CPU op-code cheat sheet in the coat pocket... ;-)
Les:
> I memorized it and threw it away. Does that mean I fail the test?
If you code in pen and ink before even going near the computer, that
counts.
Back when I were a lad, we didn't use no debugger. We'd print the
code,
and attack the printout with pencils out to mark all the bugs and
corrections, then type the changes back in.
Tim, waiting for one of the old codgers to tell us a tale of how they
had to make the valves and warm them up before starting... ;-)
=========
Type them in? I remember punching them in on Hollerith cards.
Dropped a pile of them once.
That motivated me to have the punch card machine to put sequence numbers
on the cards so that they could be resorted again.
punch card machine
Try dropping two trays , each about 2.5 feet long. They did that to me
in the data center when I was in grad school. Luckily I had just
printed they contents out and resequenced them. The manager of the data
center had a cow when I told the staff to put the deck back together,
but my advisor (bless him) stood behind me and insisted that if they had
taken due care it wouldn't have happened.
Ah cards, loved 'em (not). And drum cards. Boy there was an arcane art!
~~R
Did you have the diagonal line drawn on the top to help?
If they were Fortran, or COBOL, you could always sort on the line
number. I don't remember the other languages having line numbers.
Regards,
Les H
Yes, they were lined with a double line. But what made it easier for the
date center to reassemble was that this was the first "run" after I had
repunched the whole deck and put brand new sequence numbers on the cards.
BTW, columns 73-80 of the punch cards were ignored in Fortran so after
we had a good "production" quality program, we would have it punched by
the system card punch and have the cards sequentially number in those
columns.
We were running research simulations so the program stayed constant and
only the data portion of the deck was changing, only about 30-40 cards,
if I recall.
Simulating rolling tires to reduce friction due to flexing of the tire
construct. Now there was a research project.... :-)
~~R
