19 Feb
2015
19 Feb
'15
11:35 p.m.
On 02/19/2015 08:23 PM, Guy Sotomayor wrote:
Nope. It was (and still is) how I write code (sit
down and compose at
the keyboard). One of my old bosses at IBM once said "Yea, Guy just
waves his hands over the keyboard and programs come out".
That would have been impossible in my case, unless I had the most
prodigious eidetic memory in history.
Writing code almost always involved using an on-disk or -tape source
code library. Even if it was new code, there were significant
advantages to creating a library then modifying it as one progressed.
One would typically work with a bound listing or listings and work out
the control system directives to update the existing code base.
Remember, this was in the day of batch processing with almost no access
to terminals. Everything happened on the keypunch.
So for one to remember all of the correction set IDs and sequence
numbers for a group of programs or system programs would be more than
impressive--it'd probably merit a vivisection.
Here was one SCCS utility, UPDATE, used at CDC:
http://bitsavers.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/pdf/cdc/cyber/software/6034250…
Another was MODIFY, used on KRONOS, but basically the same functionality
as UPDATE.
So IBM had no SCCS for their system code? That's mind-boggling.
--Chuck