13 Jun
2001
13 Jun
'01
2:46 p.m.
I had a summer job in college (1978) working on an IBM 5110. It was all
BASIC, but was a pretty good BASIC as I recall.
The company was in Reston, Virginia, called the Community Management Corp.
They used to maintain condo complexes (hire grass cutters, do maintenance
work on the outsides of the units). They would charge the homeowners a
additional fee on top of their mortgages, etc.
Anyway, my claim to fame was rewriting a search program to do a bianry
search rather than a straight linear search. They sorted all the data using
IBM-supplied code sort algorithm, but then would use an inefficient
selection
search algorithm to do searches. Needless to say the binary search worked
much faster.
It was a decent job with good pay but was on the other side of the beltway.
I went back to school in the fall semester.
Eric
Stan Sieler wrote:
What is on all
those floppies anyway?
The owner told me that he used the 5110 along with an unreliable
IBM 5265 POS system. The 5110 was very reliable and he
didn't have a service contract for it. Eventually, he bought a used
5110 as a spare ... both units still work.
The POS had an 8" floppy that recorded the sales and then
the data was moved to the 5110.
He wrote the software to process the inventory and merge the
information between the two machines.
(For 1978, this was pretty good!)
That's all I know.
Stan Sieler sieler(a)allegro.com
www.allegro.com/sieler/wanted/index.html www.allegro.com/sieler