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Home -> Community -> Mailing Lists -> Oracle-L -> Re: OT -- suggestions to ensure nerdiness in potential IT staff
I can't really tell if no more answers are coming in or things are just very slow but I'll try to fill in the answers to my questions that have not been answered.
Looks like the questions about the floppy drive (or should I say drives as I had the luxury of dual drives) are the ones that need some answers. The manufacture (now gone) was Micropolis and they later made hard drives that we used on our UNIX boxes when we moved off the main frame about ten years ago. The hard sectored disks had holes to separate the sectors (the holes were much to large to separate tracks). Micropolis used a 16 hard sector floppy and then soft sectored each hard sector into two. They had an ad about never so many tracks that showed railroad tracks.
Yes, Logo was based on LISP.
It was very bad practice to use loops in APL. They were avoided by using vectors. I calculated some very actuate statistical tables for my husband on a DEC-10 using APL and picking the exact (rather than approximated values) out of the vector in about the time frame that this discussion started with - some time in the early 80s. We also had APL on the CP/M machine (a Vector Graphics if anyone is curious) but it didn't have precision of the DEC-10 and later got a DOS version. I know it was the thing to try to do everything in one line but it was also possible to write readable code (as long as you knew the symbols) and of course there was always the lamp for comments.
Speaking of on the CP/M machine and later a DOS version, I would think that the word processor that was being asked about was probably WordStar. We had that one on the CP/M machine (it was considered THE word processor at that time) and then DOS before WordPerfect. Actually had a strange experience installing the DOS version. I can't remember how much memory we had on that machine but it was a lot for it's day and WordStar gave me an error that I had insufficient memory. After checking everything I could think of, I installed a RAM disk to cut the memory down to a size mentioned in the documentation and low and behold the WordStar worked.
IBM standard label tapes could actually be cartridges (3480/3490 or are those obsolute now?). The thing about them (besides EBCDIC which no one not on an IBM used) is that they had three files for one logical file. The header and footer(?) contained documention. In addition to the format stuff they could contain: a file name, the operating system under which the file was written, the date, and I think even some sort of machine ID. If the first file, the header also had a volumn ID. I did help to set up a system in perl under AIX that would compare the information in a header with information that we had other places including an Oracle database, did some other things, and put information into the database. It would have been a lot harder without those standard label tapes.
Yes, I have used punch cards. The first computer I used was an IBM/1620. My first work with stat packages, SAS, SPSS, BMDP, was on a remote machine where the job was submitted on punch cards and if I remember correctly the jobs were not run when submitted but at a later time so that an out of order card or incorrectly punched one could make things a very slow process.
Pat
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Author: Pat Hildebrand
INET: pat_at_ssc.upenn.edu
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). Received on Fri Aug 03 2001 - 13:38:37 CDT
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