DIBOL

Years ago I worked for a company whose product went in-line with a copier harness, and would count copies. The user entered an account code, and after the copies completed, the account code, date, time and copy count was written to a cassette on a little Z80 box. We then read these tapes on a PDP-8 system (can't remember the nomenclature, but the one that looked like an office desk). The initial tape read was done with a COS-310 program and wrote the data to a floppy in some weird format whose main characteristics seemed to be that COS-310 and OS/8 could read them, but had no directory. Each customer had their own floppy with the account processing programs on it, as they often had different billing rates and such. Under OS/8, a DIBOL program read the data diskette(s) and sorted by date time, account code, combined account codes, etc, and then printed a report. The report might range anywhere from 10 pages to 300, depending on the volume (on a LA-36, no less!). Then we hand-scrawled a three letter company code on the report, and the couriers would deliver those back to the companies. Some of these law firms would bill out as few as 5% of their copies prior to our system, and we could usually get them up to 97% or so. Because this PDP-8 really interested me, I learned DIBOL and wrote a program that would write a large 3 letter banner on the cover sheet, long with that, it wrote the companies name, address, phone number and contact information, giving us a much more professional appearance. I was one of the three guys who ran tapes. We rented time on the PDP8 from a law firm, so we only had access to the machines from 6PM to 6AM. One of our people was highly (obnoxiously) religious person, prone to posting little notes. I taught myself PDP-8 assembly and modified to the tape read program to display little counter quips back at him on the VT-52. He turned about and taught himself enough to do the same, and the war escalated. After I wrote the banner program, so many customers commented on how pleasing the reports looked that the company paid me for the 20 hours or so it took to write it (at $7/hr, big money!) and a $500 bonus. Not bad for a 16 year old. --jc Richard wrote: