RE: OT -- suggestions to ensure nerdiness in potential IT staff

I remember doing APL on an IBM5100, an "AT" with a 4 inch B&W screen built on the side, and a switch to boot into APL or BASIC. The first thing they had to do was blow it to the top of the link with 64k of memory and TWO tape drives.

I could do in two hours what it took an engineer 2 days to do. In fact I visited the company 10 years later and they wanted to know if I was willing to do some more work on the box.

This was engineering, those monster storage takes for oil, gas, etc. It was great for APL... I can still remember API-650K was an algebraic formula that took 7 pages to document, and then the answer went back into the first step until it was less than 1/10th of an inch difference.

But being matrix and vector oriented, you could to the whole thing all at the same time. For what we were doing it was pretty neat.

I also remember IBM-360 model 25 and 40... 2311, 2314 disk drives...

Maks.
(Dating himself...)

> -----Original Message-----
> From: root_at_fatcity.com [mailto:root_at_fatcity.com]On Behalf Of Mercadante,
> Thomas F
> Sent: Thursday, August 02, 2001 9:41 AM
> To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L
> Subject: RE: OT -- suggestions to ensure nerdiness in potential IT staff
>
>
> "What does APL stand for? What was very bad practice in APL that other
> languages use? What was used instead?"
>
> A Programming Language. Not sure of the other questions, but I remember
> learning the greek alphabet when I was using APL. Very powerful
> vector-oriented language. You could write one-line programs to accept a
> list of numbers, and spit out the average, mean, stand. dev., max, min and
> about anything else. Pretty cool, except that picking up someone elses
> program to debug was a bitch!
>
> Tom Mercadante
> Oracle Certified Professional

-- 
Please see the official ORACLE-L FAQ: http://www.orafaq.com
-- 
Author: Michael Kline
  INET: maklinesr_at_home.com

Fat City Network Services    -- (858) 538-5051  FAX: (858) 538-5051
San Diego, California        -- Public Internet access / Mailing Lists
--------------------------------------------------------------------
To REMOVE yourself from this mailing list, send an E-Mail message
to: ListGuru_at_fatcity.com (note EXACT spelling of 'ListGuru') and in
the message BODY, include a line containing: UNSUB ORACLE-L
(or the name of mailing list you want to be removed from).  You may
also send the HELP command for other information (like subscribing).