My “first” computer at home was a Burroughs B80. My Dad bought it for his accounting business in the late 70s. It was about the size of two dishwashers, had an 8in floppy, a built in printer and a small flatscreen display (orange on black characters) on a swing arm above the keyboard.
I remember flipping through the B80’s manuals and finding a software section. We could get games for it! I asked dad if we could order some, but unfortunately, he said, the accounting software supplier would void their warrantee if we were to install any other software on the machine.
All of my computer time before buying our Apple ][+ a few years later was spent “playing” data entry on the B80 for Dad’s business.
Hey, I used one of those in an accountants in the early 80's, with the same weird orange and black screen. I recall there being no "enter" key, but several keys marked OCK1, OCK2.. etc (Operators Control Key). That was a good piece of design rather than a single "Ctrl" key on other machines.
I swear that printer could be heard several streets away!
We had a hard disk cabinet that took "cassette packs" with disk platters in them (maybe 15 inches in diameter). The engineer used to have to come out to it and re-align the heads every couple of weeks as they were not very stable.
I didn't realise there were games for it, dammit. I managed to get hold of a Cobol compiler for it, but with no other technical information about the B80, didn't get very far. No internet in those days kids.
I can't recall if the B80 had it, but there were small satellite workstations that looked similar and had a small silver button under the desk at exactly knee height. On my first day I was introduced to the "shit button". So named because if you accidentally knocked it, it reset the machine and lost all your work. Most people taped a small cover over it.
Fond memories of the B80, and it's big brother the B800 which I used at a different job. Boy was that sophisticated... it needed a paper tape through a "rat trap" to boot it.
> I recall there being no "enter" key, but several keys marked OCK1, OCK2.. etc (Operators Control Key). That was a good piece of design rather than a single "Ctrl" key on other machines.
I was even more impressed with the existence of "Go" key (allowing to signal the successful end of the form entry and to start the action, which was different than just using "enter" to end the entering of one field) on the Burroughs 20 line (with the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convergent_Technologies_Operat... ). It's making a lot of endings of "dialogs" much more logical, as well as the movement through the fields -- enter is just moving to the next field, not ending the dialog or doing whatever is selected, like in Windows.
Back when I was in University, we had an Amdahl mainframe with Unix running under VM. The directory structure included an awful lot of source code. I remember porting source for lex and yacc to my PC-XT running Borland's Turbo C. I assume it was licensed to Universities and source was included under an educational clause, though I'm not exactly sure.
I wonder which version of unix I was using. This would have been around December of '87.
It was either CMS (a single-user UNIX-like commonly distributed with VM) or VM/IX aka AIX/370 (an IBM-flavored SysV, but almost totally unrelated to the other AIX products.)
I wrote a language called T for Bell Northern Research, not knowing there was already another T language based on Scheme. The language was used for black box testing testing of terminal interfaces, and so needed good string handling.
One aspect of the language was that Unix regular expressions were a built-in type, and so were associate arrays. These two features worked together in a cool way:
I am a Canadian, so I neither have a say, or really can comment on American politics.
This Saturday, my two daughters (ages 11 and 8) are driving a 1,700km journey to North Dakota to show our support for the #NoDAPL movement. I am doing it because my eldest is really into Aboriginal rights right now. These people are just trying to preserve their land.
"Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of “capitalist democracy” into an oxymoron."
As a Marxist, I actually agree with his point here. Of course he was being provocative but I don't think malicious, not by any means.
He did not mean women should not have been given the vote. And "welfare beneficiaries" actually doesn't refer to minorities there (although they'd be included among the beneficiaries of the New Deal).
What he said and meant, translated into Leftist language, is that it was clear by the 1920s that there was no longer any hope for resolving the crisis of bourgeois democracy. In other words, democracy and capitalism had become contradictory, incompatible. That's true, and had been true long before 1920, but the concept of history he articulates isn't totally incorrect. At least he thinks.
It is worth noting that the 1920s was also the decade when the German Left collapsed, all but sealing the fate of the October Revolution with it. Theil misrecognizes history when he blames the failure of the bourgeois revolution on politics, but he isn't wrong to recognize the importance of the bourgeois revolution. He just doesn't go far enough--only the socialist revolution could fulfill the promises of the bourgeois revolution (Great French Revolution).
I give a sort of point-by-point critique of his essay here:
But even if you accept that "democracy and capitalism had become contradictory, incompatible" Theil favors the latter over the former. Bad feels ensue.
You're just posting bullshit lies about Thiel everywhere you can. He said it pretty explicitly:
> It would be absurd to suggest that women’s votes will be taken away or that this would solve the political problems that vex us. While I don’t think any class of people should be disenfranchised, I have little hope that voting will make things better.
He also points out that the "most intense reaction" was to the factual "commonplace statistical observation about voting patterns that is often called the gender gap".
Lying is one of the main reasons the Democrats lost. Learn something from their failure.
Leonard's music had an uncanny sense of timing, both musical and cultural. He referenced the external, political world, indirectly - not through selfishly inward bullshit, like many of his contemporaries, but by sifting it through relationships with others and his relationship to the divine.
As I am writing this, the next article in hackernews is about Peter Thiel and his ascension to whatever office he is seeking in Trump's cabinet. His views on the damage women and minorities have done to Libertarianism (whatever that is), and how democracy is shit are well known, and I will let you judge how Palantir has benefited humanity.
The thing that gets me is his straight faced desire for immortality. Note that he doesn't wish for immortality for someone who is great, he wishes it for himself.
He was merely demonstrating the contrast between two people and doing so politely and in an eloquent way, whether you agree with him or not why should the mods be involved? And why should he be ashamed of himself/herself..
I think you're both right. Which means best to leave it alone and move on IMHO. The first sentence of his post about Cohen is nicely put, "uncanny timing" and all that. Then he spoiled it with a whiny point on politics.
Cohen said something funny about his time spent meditating at a zen buddhist monastery in the hills. He said of the experience that "on a superficial level it basically gets you to stop whining"..."it makes whining the least appropriate response to suffering".*
Prefix notation (ie. + 1 1) instead of infix notation (ie. 1 + 1) is much easier parse, as there are no precedence rules and you don't require different conventions for expressions and function calls.
There was once a programmer who wrote software for personal computers. "Look at how well off I am here," he said to a mainframe programmer who came to visit. "I have my own operating system and file storage device. I do not have to share my resources with anyone. The software is self-consistent and easy-to-use. Why do you not quit your present job and join me here?"
The mainframe programmer then began to describe his system to his friend, saying, "The mainframe sits like an ancient Sage meditating in the midst of the Data Center. Its disk drives lie end-to- end like a great ocean of machinery. The software is as multifaceted as a diamond, and as convoluted as a primeval jungle. The programs, each unique, move through the system like a swift-flowing river. That is why I am happy where I am."
The personal computer programmer, upon hearing this, fell silent. But the two programmers remained friends until the end of their days.
The wise programmer is told about Tao and follows it. The average programmer is told about Tao and searches for it. The foolish programmer is told about Tao and laughs at it.
In 1999, a COBOL programmer, tasked with updating bank software for the year Y2K switch, became overwhelmed.
"Look at all of this code!" he exclaimed. "I'll never be able to fix it all in time!"
Horrified by the media depictions of apocalypse brought by financial meltdown and software-launched nuclear warheads, all because of the Y2K bug, he became very anxious.
So, he went to the cryogenic freezing facility and told them, "Wake me up when Y2K is over."
He laid in the cryotube and gently fell asleep as the cold began to overtake him.
The next thing he knew, he was laying on a bed in a warm room, bright lights and white walls giving the room a certain sterility. A doctor in a lab coat was standing over him holding a clipboard.
"Oh, thank heavens!" said the programmer. "We've made it out alive!"
"Yes," said the doctor. "The year is 2999, and it says in your chart you know COBOL?"
And yet, if you didn't mind that kind of work, you could have been making a fortune from 1999 to now. You'll be retired before COBOL is no longer used.
There is a large market for maintaining legacy COBOL, SNOBOL, and various esoteric assembly codebases. Additionally APL and its derivatives are not entirely dead.
SNOBOL should be looked at, if for nothing else, for its string handling (add a brief look at Icon right afterwards). I would have killed to take APL in college, but despite having to program on an IBM 370 mainframe, no classes were offered. I'm still a little ticked.
I have over the years played with it, but I was rather annoyed that having to put up with all the disadvantages of using an IBM 370 that we didn't get some advantages.
And depending on when your brother-in-law made the statement, he stood just as much of a chance or greater of being right than you did. COBOL will always be around (those 80 billion lines of code don't maintain themselves), but microprocessor and PCs could have broken any number of ways. Granted, a good knowledge of C and Unix will go a long way and be applicable to whatever ends up "winning", but it was no guarantee to the exact language and OS that would keep one employed.
My interests in C, compilers, small computers and Unix at the time wasn't driven by career aspirations. I was just genuinely interested those things. Maybe I was "unemployable".
Meh, I'm down with that. I would be a much richer man today had I chosen more wisely. But I would not be a happier man.
Maybe I was "unemployable".
Despite my comment to the (somewhat) contrary, as long as you're not specialist in BeOS or the like, in software you'll almost always make money doing what you like to do. Again, whatever ends up winning, the abstractions and concepts you pick up will generally prove useful where ever you end up. You might not be raking in the Benjamins like your SAP buddy over there pulling down $350K/year, but you'll be relatively wealthy and happy.
In the late 80's, my academic advisor said he wouldn't sign off on me taking a COBOL class because that was a business department IT class and would not go with the rest of my studies[1]. I wasn't really into the idea anyway and filled my schedule with other classes. I do wonder what other CompSci departments at the time were doing.
1) EE was the sole teacher of FORTRAN and I decided against that also, more from a teacher problem than a lack of desire to learn FORTRAN which I later did (without the all caps).
We had it too (I went to a mixed IT-business university). I think the idea was to get some perspective on what COBOL is, so if you're managing a company one day and IT people you hire tell you that something is hard to do, or takes too much time because the system is in COBOL, you know what they're talking about and don't think that they're just messing with you.
You know, I really didn't know then or now. The Business school taught COBOL and RPG on, I do believe, an AS/400 they owned separate from the rest of the computer infrastructure. I might be remembering wrong, but I was pretty sure that was the story[1]. I think it was something to do with the information systems degree requirements.
1) my Dad did IT on an AS/400, I still hear "wand in" instead of login.
I remember flipping through the B80’s manuals and finding a software section. We could get games for it! I asked dad if we could order some, but unfortunately, he said, the accounting software supplier would void their warrantee if we were to install any other software on the machine.
All of my computer time before buying our Apple ][+ a few years later was spent “playing” data entry on the B80 for Dad’s business.