31 Oct
2006
31 Oct
'06
9:43 p.m.
On 31 Oct 2006 at 23:18, Doc Shipley wrote:
Or cheat horribly and attach a bunch of TU58
emulators to a box with
multi-line serial board....
...or just do it with some disk files.
When I first encountered really big (100MB+) hard disk storage, one
of the guys on my programming team was ecstatic because he thought he
could invent some really new and revolutionary sort using disk files--
after all, random access, unlike tape, takes little more time than
consecutive access (why did IBM ever call it "sequential"?) on a disk
file.
After about a month of fooling around with various ideas, he reported
that his balloon had been burst--a plain old balanced merge worked
about as well as anything.
Cheers,
Chuck