30 Mar
2020
30 Mar
'20
8:41 a.m.
On Mon, Mar 30, 2020 at 09:31:56AM -0600, Warner Losh wrote:
And the cards bent due to humidity and stuck together while you read them right?
Yep. yep.
On Mon, Mar 30, 2020 at 8:13 AM Diane Bruce <db at
db.net> wrote:
> On Sun, Mar 29, 2020 at 05:33:35PM -0600, Warner Losh wrote:
> > On Sun, Mar 29, 2020, 5:10 PM Diane Bruce via cctalk <
> cctalk at classiccmp.org>
> > wrote:
> >
> ...
...
A dropped card deck was disaster and how many folks filled in columns 73
to 80
with an index? Not very many. :-(
Worse: 80% of the cards had that, but the other 20% didn't since they were
later bug fixes.
The decks that I had to verify were from the "in the barn" days of the
company and had sat in storage for a few years. People would remove cards
from the top box in the stack to show visitors and weren't great about
putting them back exactly in order... So when the boss, who was sure he semi-real editor (visual TECO at a glorious 4800
baud). and I learned a lot
about FORTRAN and just how bad it could be (the boss was a great
businessman, much better than his FORTRAN prowess).
The worst Fortran I remember was from Scientists. I got to fix some of that
back in the day. Nowadays a lot of them learn C/C++ and are not horrible
coders now. Early Fortran as you remember was pretty easy to turn into spaghetti
code. WATFOR and IFTRAN helped.
Ah yes the
LARGE array with indexes used as pointers trick. *ugh* I
remember.
Yea. And ugly tricks to overlay/alias heap1, heap2 and heap4 (which were
for byte, word and longword access respectively). And converting between
the different "pointer" types. It was helle ugly... But pointers in C that
I learned a few years later were a piece of cake in
comparison...
Pointers were a treat compared to the horrible Fortran mess and was very
appreciated.
Ha! We had some assembler for the most time critical bits, but we wrote
that in MACRO-11 directly and linked it in.
Yep. BTDT I did a lot of 'raw' MACRO-11 too.
Warner
Diane
--
- db at FreeBSD.org db at db.net http://www.db.net/~db