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

> Sort of like UNIX in that it was sparse on the vowels.

What are you talking about?

There's 2 of them right there in the name.

Jared ;)

                                                                                       
                             
                    tday6_at_csc.com                                                      
                             
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                    om                   Subject:     Re: OT -- suggestions to ensure 
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                    08/02/01 08:27                                                     
                             
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In 1981 my oldest child was 2 and I was working on a very primitive RDBMS at Boeing.

As a pre-teen I was making a crystal radio and wondering why anyone would pay for batteries or electricity to power the radio when you could get all the energy that you needed from the broadcast itself.

As a summer job in college I coded Computer Aided Instruction programs written in Coursewriter II that ran on an IBM 70x (don't remember the last digit) which had a magnetic core memory. Output came back on IBM electric typewriters that had been Rube Goldberged up as personal printers.

My 2nd IT job was as a computer operator on an IBM 360. The boot sequence was toggled in using switches on the front of the computer. The IBM 370 had a 5 1/4" disk hard-wired that contained the boot sequence (circa 1977).

did a survey to find the most used micro computer in the business environment. Then they went out and built a whole suite of integrated business products for that computer. There was a spreadsheet (BoeingCalc), a word processor, a mail program,a TTY terminal emulator, etc. Cost millions to develop. Unfortunately, it was developed for the Terak, not the IBM PC. The Terak was a rack-mounted 8-bit microprocessor whose main role was to control 6-axis milling machines. Not much demand for an integrated business suite there.

Hard sectored floppies had their tracks physically defined. If I remember right there were a series of small holes punched between each track so that the head could align itself with the track. Soft sectored floppies are what we use today, where the media is continuous over the whole surface and the track (and the inter track gap) are defined magnetically. I do remember the 8" floppies. They made great frisbies.

APL is "A Programming Language." If I remember right it didn't allow GOTOs. It also had its own keyboard with its own character set. Completely unintelligible to the uninitiated.

Was the turtle language based on LISP?

800 BPI or 1600 BPI tapes? What's the blocking factor? I forget what the IEUtility was that I used for reading those standard (and non-standard) labels, but once you figured out the block size and the blocking factor you could dump the tape to an EPSDIC flat file and figure out the record layout. I saved many a boss's butt doing that in my early years.

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