Would you benefit from file manager on your Kobo reader?

[moffattm]

Originally Posted by DNSB

DOS? You young un's always seem to thing the computer world started with DOS. OS/8, RDOS, Unix, CP/M ... now those were disk operating systems you could have fun with. Or totally screw up everything...

Regards,
David

One of my first computers used CP/M. I remember having to press ctrl-c every time you changed floppy disks because CP/M couldn't detect that you'd inserted a new disk and without the ctrl-c you could screw up the file system on the disk. How's that for "user-friendly"?!?

[moffattm]

Originally Posted by DNSB

I have horrible memories of JCL. Going from a simple UNIX command line to having to use JCL was as bad as going from coding in WatFor to coding in COBOL.

And what, may I ask, is wrong with COBOL? I thought it was pretty cool how you could say things like "ADD YEARS TO AGE" rather than something like "age = age + years" which other languages used.

One language that I really struggled with was RPG; getting everything in the right column was always a chore.

[Ken Maltby]

Originally Posted by moffattm

And what, may I ask, is wrong with COBOL? I thought it was pretty cool how you could say things like "ADD YEARS TO AGE" rather than something like "age = age + years" which other languages used.

One language that I really struggled with was RPG; getting everything in the right column was always a chore.

I also remember the COBOL/Fortran combo with some fondness, but not a spilled card deck, that also haunts those memories. (Talk about adding years...)

Luck;
Ken

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by moffattm

And what, may I ask, is wrong with COBOL? I thought it was pretty cool how you could say things like "ADD YEARS TO AGE" rather than something like "age = age + years" which other languages used.

One language that I really struggled with was RPG; getting everything in the right column was always a chore.

I just found that COBOL was horribly wordy. Something that took one line in APL and 10 lines in Waterloo Fortran took 2 pages in COBOL. Admittedly, the APL code was write only, the Fortran code took quite a few comments while the COBOL code was pretty easy to follow without comments.

For columns, there was the day I discovered that JCL did not see anything past the 80th column. No warnings, just characters that went directly to the bit bucket. Definitely, a WTF moment.

Hmmm... what else? Forth was a learning experience.

Regards,
David

[dmapr]

Punched tape. I don't want to ever see that again.

[PeterT]

Originally Posted by DNSB

Something that took one line in APL and 10 lines in Waterloo Fortran took 2 pages in COBOL. Admittedly, the APL code was write only, the Fortran code took quite a few comments while the COBOL code was pretty easy to follow without comments.

APL That was the first computer language I learnt; Grade 8 in high school in Montreal )

[PeterT]

Originally Posted by dmapr

Punched tape. I don't want to ever see that again.

Ah yes... the carriage control tape for a 1403 line printer, and also the boot loaded for a DEC-10 system. Those were the days.

[moffattm]

Originally Posted by Ken Maltby

I also remember the COBOL/Fortran combo with some fondness, but not a spilled card deck, that also haunts those memories. (Talk about adding years...)

Luck;
Ken

Fortunately I didn't have to worry about punched cards, that was a little before my time But one of my first jobs after leaving tech was working on payroll and accounting systems that used COBOL. This was on Prime systems, I never had any IBM experience so no JCL for me (although we had CPL which I think was something similar).

[moffattm]

Originally Posted by DNSB

I just found that COBOL was horribly wordy. Something that took one line in APL and 10 lines in Waterloo Fortran took 2 pages in COBOL. Admittedly, the APL code was write only, the Fortran code took quite a few comments while the COBOL code was pretty easy to follow without comments.

For columns, there was the day I discovered that JCL did not see anything past the 80th column. No warnings, just characters that went directly to the bit bucket. Definitely, a WTF moment.

Hmmm... what else? Forth was a learning experience.

Regards,
David

Yes, COBOL was indeed very wordy, but then that kind of made it self-commenting.

I never had to endure Forth, but I remember reading about an English home computer, the Jupiter Ace, that came out in the early 80's and that included Forth as it's built-in language rather than the more traditional BASIC. This interested me quite a bit but I guess it was a step to far for the general public and was the main reason this home computer didn't sell too well.

I used PL/1 a bit. Prime created a couple of spin-off languages that were based on PL/1, PLP and SPL, that they used internally for systems development. I was quite lucky in that I worked for the New Zealand agent for Prime and so we had access to a lot of Prime source code. Looking through the source of Primos was fun, found a few undocumented routines that I made use of.

Ah, happy memories...

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by PeterT

Ah yes... the carriage control tape for a 1403 line printer, and also the boot loaded for a DEC-10 system. Those were the days.

Memories of toggling in the first boot loader for a Data General Nova minicomputer and then reading the 4 bits at a time punched tape with the boot loader to get the loader for the full OS. Nothing like toggling switches for 10 minutes to find that you made a mistake and the boot loader didn't run.

My first S-100 bus computer had a front panel, the next edition had a home brewed boot EPROM that allowed me to do quite a bit of stuff from the console including reading a Tarbell format cassette tape to load programs. The fun of driving down to Seattle to buy a specific model of portable cassette tape player from J. C. Penney as it was THE recommended unit.

Regards,
David

[Ken Maltby]

Originally Posted by DNSB

Memories of toggling in the first boot loader for a Data General Nova minicomputer and then reading the 4 bits at a time punched tape with the boot loader to get the loader for the full OS. Nothing like toggling switches for 10 minutes to find that you made a mistake and the boot loader didn't run.

My first S-100 bus computer had a front panel, the next edition had a home brewed boot EPROM that allowed me to do quite a bit of stuff from the console including reading a Tarbell format cassette tape to load programs. The fun of driving down to Seattle to buy a specific model of portable cassette tape player from J. C. Penney as it was THE recommended unit.

Regards,
David

Ah... back when OCD was a good thing "Octal Coded Decimal" and three sets of three switches got to be the stars of the show.

Luck;
Ken

[TechniSol]

Oh my goodness, we've stumbled into the "Old Fart's Computer Club and Home for Indigent Hackers"... Hmmm, let's see, I recall the Altair, but was a bit too young to get my hands on one, bought my first PC as a teenager, a Timex-Sinclair TS1000 with 2K of memory upgraded to a whopping 16KB as soon as I could, quickly moved to an Apple ][+ before college, then three years later went to work for a company building S-100 bus based industrial controls. Ah, me. Those were the days, nothing like hoping you hadn't driven several hundred miles and needed eproms you didn't have to fix something... the good old days.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by TechniSol

Oh my goodness, we've stumbled into the "Old Fart's Computer Club and Home for Indigent Hackers"... Hmmm, let's see, I recall the Altair, but was a bit too young to get my hands on one, bought my first PC as a teenager, a Timex-Sinclair TS1000 with 2K of memory upgraded to a whopping 16KB as soon as I could, quickly moved to an Apple ][+ before college, then three years later went to work for a company building S-100 bus based industrial controls. Ah, me. Those were the days, nothing like hoping you hadn't driven several hundred miles and needed eproms you didn't have to fix something... the good old days.

Old fart, maybe. Indigent? Hardly. Hacker? Deny everything, admit nothing, demand proof!

Looking back, what I remember most is the fun we had with computers then. Microcomputers were the domain of the hobbyist and there were so many different systems, users groups and magazines. There were all the hobbyist run BBS systems and long distance phone bills that were unbelievable. Now, it's serious business and not that much fun anymore.

I was digging in the basement a few months back and ran into my collection of Byte and Kilobaud magazines. The first Robert Tinney cover for Byte brought back a lot of memories.

Regards,
David

[TechniSol]

Yes, it was FUN. So many miss(ed) out on that because they only look(ed) at them as another means to an end. I can't properly express the joy of building an allophone based speech synthesizer laboriously point to point wired on a PC board for the Apple][+ bus and hearing it say "Hello Mahster" for the first time in an oddly Scottish inflected dialect. Let alone to appreciate all the brain sweat and time it took to do such things and now today treat everything like an appliance. I mean, how many understand squat about a car but the bare minimum required to drive it -let alone computers or microcontroller based anythings?

I fear, perhaps unfairly, that we're breeding generations of high technology users who are clueless about underlying principles or even manufacturing. I fear we, they, may one day find themselves in one of those dystopian futures where when things no longer function no one, or damned few, has a clue how to make them work. Or that our continued reliance on foreign production will eventually resort in our having few people in the US capable of actually manufacturing anything...

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by TechniSol

Yes, it was FUN. So many miss(ed) out on that because they only look(ed) at them as another means to an end. I can't properly express the joy of building an allophone based speech synthesizer laboriously point to point wired on a PC board for the Apple][+ bus and hearing it say "Hello Mahster" for the first time in an oddly Scottish inflected dialect. Let alone to appreciate all the brain sweat and time it took to do such things and now today treat everything like an appliance. I mean, how many understand squat about a car but the bare minimum required to drive it -let alone computers or microcontroller based anythings?

I fear, perhaps unfairly, that we're breeding generations of high technology users who are clueless about underlying principles or even manufacturing. I fear we, they, may one day find themselves in one of those dystopian futures where when things no longer function no one, or damned few, has a clue how to make them work. Or that our continued reliance on foreign production will eventually resort in our having few people in the US capable of actually manufacturing anything...

I don't know if anyone remembers reading a short story by Isaac Asimov called The Fun They Had but it strikes me as becoming more fact than fiction and a lot faster than Doc Asimov would have predicted.

http://users.aber.ac.uk/dgc/funtheyhad.html

Regards,
David