Re: Newbie question on table design.
Date: 3 May 2007 08:40:59 -0700
Message-ID: <1178206859.654128.149990_at_y5g2000hsa.googlegroups.com>
You did COBOL on a CDC? Me, too!~ At Georgia Tech. The thing would convert COBOL data types into floating point, then back again and it still ran faster than the IBM hardware on campus.
And, yes, I remember the card decks, color coded and rubber-banded together.
The three of us are going into "Old Fart Mode" now!
>> is that CDC culture discovered interactive development later than DEC culture did. <<
Yes, but it discovered large data sets from the start since it was a scientific machine. Ever see a data cell machine?
Sure. Punch cards then tapes. The 3270 terminals batched up a screen full of data, you hit XMIT and it went over as if it were a deck of cards.
I worked with DEC, DG and most of the mini-computers in those days. I remember Dibol and DG-Algol and versions of PL/I on Honeywell.
My first language, FORTRAN II, then IV and then 77
But what the first tool to use the metadata to check production code against those standards? "this variable is not in the dictionary!" or "part_nbr is defined as CHAR(9) and not INTEGER" or "street_addr must be used city_name, state_code and postal_code as a single data element"
Panvalet and the other source code tools were really glorified copy books with timestamps added. The full data dictionary was a major leap in concept and product, not an evolutionary thing -- like the pre-Cambrian explosion in biology.
I profile from experience, since I teach a lot of SQL. I have found this a very, very strong symptom of "file system mindset"; sometimes people really do mean record and not row when their SQL product uses contiguous storage or data is coming from a file system into the RDBMS and they are concerned with a physical problem they are having.
Has anyone collected all of his RM stuff under one cover? It should be easy to do, but everyone will fight over the commentary. Received on Thu May 03 2007 - 17:40:59 CEST