20 Feb
2015
20 Feb
'15
7:22 a.m.
On Feb 19, 2015, at 11:35 PM, Chuck Guzis <cclist
at sydex.com> wrote:
;-)
I never said that I didn't / don't use references while I write code. It's
just that I don't write my code down first. Of course most of what I do is new (from
scratch) rather than modifying existing code.
When I first started at IBM because build time for our software was about a week, we'd
fix bugs and such with patches. Folks in the lab would stop looking up the instruction
encodings and would just ask me...I could do the assembly in my head...I'm sorely out
of practice now. :-/
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.
I used a number of SCMs while I was at IBM. Many of them home grown. The last one I used
was ORBIT which was internal and later IBM turned it into a program product (with a
different name of course).
TTFN - Guy