24 Oct
2024
24 Oct
'24
5:02 p.m.
> Impressive claims were made about station wagon
full of tapes hurtling
> down the highway.
On Thu, 24 Oct 2024, Chuck Guzis via cctalk wrote:
I still have the Samsonite briefcase I used to
transport 7-track tapes
as carry-on baggage. Jets even then, were much faster than station
wagons. 6 tapes to a trip.
More than once it was "hand the tapes to someone meeting you at the gate
and catch the next return flight".
I sold Microsoft FORTRAN [for TRS80] to the college (while I was both
teaching and running a business)
I was not the teacher of the FORTRAN class.
But Lifeboat (the distributor) kept missing deadlines, and telling me that
it had been shipped, and then telling me that it would be shipped soon.
So, I called my friend Bob Wallace who was still working at Microsoft (he
was the tenth employee). On my way back from the eclipse in Montana, I
flew back with a stop in Seattle. Bob got the FIRST THREE copies (so
THAT's why Lifeboat couldn't ship yet!), and handed them to me in the
Seattle airport.
I was not impressed by The teacher.
He was as sharp as a bag of wet hair.
He announced that the compilers "DO NOT WORK", because he typed in a tiny
trivial code example in the manual, and it failed due to a typo of a
missing comma in the printing of the manual. (That any REAL FORTRAN
programmer would spot immediately.)
I corrected his source code, and he grudgingly accepted them.
A few years later, he left (without notice) for a position at Cal State
Hayward, and, with six hours notice, I began teaching Fortran. But, by
that time, the college was using IBM Microsoft Fortran for the PC (which
had its own problems)
--
Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin(a)xenosoft.com