Fortran was also used extensively in early mincomputers for pure commercial work, e.g. the late 70's GA16-440 "KATHY" Dispatcher system from Logisticon used by JC Penney for a few years. I wrote a good percentage of that (although not one of the system originators - Hi, Gregory, Hi Jackson!). Fortran was used because it's what the manufacturer had on tap, and was a fairly easy port to a mini's instruction set, and (in this case General Automation) minicomputers because they were comparatively cheap as dirt. You had to do a lot of low end stuff like character parsing yourself, but like anything else you build up a library of primitive routines and build up from there. Elegant? Nope. Frustrating as hell? Yup. Fast? You bet, very good response from old technology. Mmmmm... ferrite donuts.
Treat me like a criminal and I'm much more likely to actually turn into one.
That's actually rather an astute post, Stokessd. It's amazing how much the perception of write and wrong can be guided by the manipulation of culture by a few people with the tools of big media on their side.
Just a second, I think that's someone at the do$%&^{=[NO CARRIER]
I would like to add one other thing. I believe companies also announce products so that the consumer doesn't buy their competitor product (and get inundated) even before it's released. For example, Levono 'leaked' their X300. Yeah, you're telling me that wasn't calculated.
This goes way, way back. IBM, ever the hardball player in the mainframe arena, announced the System 360 and OS/360 before it was even on the drawing boards, as a same-week response to CDC's announcement of one of the Cray-designed CDC 6000 series computers. IBM didn't deliver until well over a year after announcement. Practices such as these helped precipitate the decade of litigation known as "IBM vs the BUNCH (Burroughs, Univac, NCR, CDC and Honeywell)" although it was the BUNCH who went after IBM for monopolistic practices.
The endless chain of litigation (which made the SCO/Unix litigation look like a lawn mower dispute) was finally finished when two tapes that contained the index to whole warehouses of source documents (punch cards, mostly) were "accidentally" scrubbed.
Well, according to Aus. Bureau of Statistics, "Jedi" is one. That is, it's resurgence is modern; it's origins were long ago, in a galaxy far far away...
Oh and I'm a strict constructionist Pastafarian myself, I guess that one's fairly new. Arrrr.
The black box should be ejected, or ejectable from the plane at certain acceleration levels if at all possible (accelerations such as those you would experience shortly after your "Hey, what's that sheep doing up in this cloud?" moment). The Lockheed D-21 supersonic drone used to drop the hatch containing spy cameras before landing, so there's build precedent. This would be in addition to filling the entire box with silicon rubber after assembly into it's own little alloy billet and all those other wonders our diseased minds can think of to isolate them from their little moment of hell.
Thanks for that, very useful. I will do my very best to effect that change, although the effect may be to effect a gerund somewhere. I distrust gerunds, believing them to be an affectation.
o Is liquid nitrogen legal?
o What about high voltage?
o Blue-tack?
o What's the maximum weight of demolition hammer allowed?
o Are battle-bots allowed to be equipped with smooth bore cannon?
o Are capacitor-fed tack welders permitted?
o Cowboy Neal?
Hehe yep, golden rule applies; man with the gold makes the rules.
I was being roundly sarcastic of course but I'm old & entitled to it.
But the scarier bit I put in was the "redundant IP addresses". Place I had a gig with recently had terrible DHCP response, so they kept buying DHCP servers. All replicated, right down to the address lists. 25 of them for a single smallish building. It was the most amazing case of whack-a-mole I ever saw, watching people booting each other off with address collisions. Nobody could depend on a connection for more than 10 minutes, if that. I just thank the Ultimate Noodle they were behind a NAT at least. And yes, I did tell them about it.
Kind of like a PHB making computer and networking decisions
I categorically resent that. Historically our business transformation architecture achieves multipoint synergies by the close-tracking of business channel optimisation strategies, and our decision workshopping with regard to procurement of necessary infrastructure precludes the detail assessment quid-pro-quo with regard to non-executive decision makers. If I say we need duplicate DHCP servers then by god I want them to be exact duplicates, from their highly redundant address lists right down to the tiny little rubber feet!
And I have great hair! Just... not much of it any more.
I always buy bottled water. That is, I buy bottled water when the cap on my existing water bottle gets too manky from reusing it for too long, then I toss that one and buy another. The cap keeps me from spilling it all over my keyboard when I turn around to talk with someone.
Generally get a couple of weeks out of one bottle, and that's not a long time between drinks. Tap water is good enough for me, if I don't like it I'm not thirsty enough.
That does not pertain to occasional visits to Adelaide, of course -- I'm never thirsty enough for that stuff.
That does help bring it into focus, thanks. Thanks also to the peeps who wrote those lovely Wikipedia articles, too -- scholarly and in-depth stuff.
I was thinking of SQL Server primarily because of speed and reliability, but your comment "one size does not fit all" made me think about all that referential overhead of SQL Server vs. the rather flat structures of X.500 that Exchange used for meta. Think I'll go along with you there, too.
Wow I'm being agreeable today. Don't get used to it.
The Exchange database gives me the heebie-jeebies It used to give me no end of grief, and I'd specialised in the product for several years since the first test release. It's not really designed as a low level server, it was always strictly targeted at the large enterprise. The record structure was very close to full X.500 (I'd gone through the Exchange DB in raw mode and have studied the full X.500 standard) and I was tempted to publish the term "irrelational" for the DB structure, but I had to act the apologist because I made my living off the product. X.500 always looked like a comp sci major wrote it before he learned about key structures. The DB was kind of crap, being iirc one of the iterations of JET but the replication feature was pretty strong as long as you didn't try to put servers on slow/unreliable lines in the same site (if one site lagged, they all did, I/O completion problem).
However they did eventually clean it up and you no longer had to worry quite as much about the IS falling apart like a badly stacked sandwich. Eventually the Exchange directory evolved into Active Directory because the MSFT strategy veered toward LDAP. In fact, the newest release has Exchange using the AD paths instead of internal connectors. It's evolving, and it still scales pretty well. I don't know if they have, but I'd think moving the engine to SQL Server would be a good idea if they haven't already. But they've got so much grief atm working on compliance issues (SOX, Basel 2 etc.) that I doubt they have a lot of spare time on their hands.
Oh, and I've done a few Lotus / Domino installations and a bit of L3 support too, and I honestly believe that Exchange at its worst is easier to manage than Notes at its best at the enterprise level. Personal experience, no formal measurements, but mostly I didn't like Notes' fire-and-forget admin interface (I like fast feedback) or the fragile security structure.
PST's used the old JET engine too (I think it was the same one used for MS Access) and I always found they became unreliable after about 50MB, and you did *not* want the PST on a network share (it wasn't supported anyway).
You should take off your fanboy hat and blinders long enough to realize how wrong you are.
HAH! My speed is faster than your speed, and my modem is bigger too. And don't let me get started on the size of my hard drive, it's really, really big!
Ok, when I was little it was all about the size of your carburetor.
"Why does the porridge bird lay its egg in the air?"
White dust the poor rich Barney lay its eggs in the eyre? HONK Delay. You have violated Robot's Rules of Order and will be asked to leave the future immediately.
Ref: soup-through-nose computer humour from the Nixon Administration - punch-card era stuff, remarkably visionary. Firesign Theatre, "I Think We're All Bozos On This Bus". Very strongly recommended.
Aye on the steampunk. The engine could power a small hand-wound dynamo that heats up the boiler for the steam effect you need for those "special" web sites. Don't forget the three colour LED's you need to light the steam.
Efficient? Sorry, what's that? Yes, I know we're just re-using heat that would otherwise be wasted, but we'd be getting multidimensional cool...
one of the main reasons that Windows is getting targetted by viruses is its market share... Win2k was NT 5.0. XP was NT 5.1. Vista is NT 6.0. They dumped the entire kernel
And NT was a port of VMS, check the history. Dave Cutler was the architect of both operating systems, and you'll see common parameter names in both VMS' Sysgen and the NT Registry, particularly around memory management.
Why was VMS secure and NT so very not? VMS was matched to the Vax hardware, which supported Kernel, Executive, Supervisor and User modes. Intel x86 chip set didn't support all those modes, which meant certain heavy duty machine instructions could be run in address spaces they shouldn't have shared with user code.
I would suggest that if there were a version of Windows written that would be acceptably secure, it would be in Microsoft's best interests to consider working with Intel to provide an instruction set that could do a better job of ring-fencing instructions and address space.
Would you ever scrap thousands of hours for which you paid people to work on your product?
Hell yes. They teach you that in MBA 101, and the term is "throwing good money after bad". You do **not** spend more money on a project that will not net any returns, you cancel the accounting codes and flog the furniture (sell -- I meant sell the furniture).
Famous quote from W.Gates - "If we don't obsolete our own software, someone else will." I don't think they quite meant obsoleting it in advance, but there you go, apologies for the gerund.
Slashdot Mirror
I believe Russia had some very credible Vax clones during that era, reverse-engineered and built in bulk. Also a rather eclectic array of 2nd gen stuff, a couple of PC (including Apple ][) clones and the odd mainframe. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_computer_hardware_in_Soviet_Bloc_countries/
Um, wouldn't the 40 minute one-way light time be a bit of an obstacle?
oh, wait...
Fortran was also used extensively in early mincomputers for pure commercial work, e.g. the late 70's GA16-440 "KATHY" Dispatcher system from Logisticon used by JC Penney for a few years. I wrote a good percentage of that (although not one of the system originators - Hi, Gregory, Hi Jackson!). Fortran was used because it's what the manufacturer had on tap, and was a fairly easy port to a mini's instruction set, and (in this case General Automation) minicomputers because they were comparatively cheap as dirt. You had to do a lot of low end stuff like character parsing yourself, but like anything else you build up a library of primitive routines and build up from there. Elegant? Nope. Frustrating as hell? Yup. Fast? You bet, very good response from old technology. Mmmmm... ferrite donuts.
That's actually rather an astute post, Stokessd. It's amazing how much the perception of write and wrong can be guided by the manipulation of culture by a few people with the tools of big media on their side.
Just a second, I think that's someone at the do$%&^{=[NO CARRIER]
This goes way, way back. IBM, ever the hardball player in the mainframe arena, announced the System 360 and OS/360 before it was even on the drawing boards, as a same-week response to CDC's announcement of one of the Cray-designed CDC 6000 series computers. IBM didn't deliver until well over a year after announcement. Practices such as these helped precipitate the decade of litigation known as "IBM vs the BUNCH (Burroughs, Univac, NCR, CDC and Honeywell)" although it was the BUNCH who went after IBM for monopolistic practices.
The endless chain of litigation (which made the SCO/Unix litigation look like a lawn mower dispute) was finally finished when two tapes that contained the index to whole warehouses of source documents (punch cards, mostly) were "accidentally" scrubbed.
Hmm... Lenovo. Wasn't that an IBM spinoff?
Well, according to Aus. Bureau of Statistics, "Jedi" is one. That is, it's resurgence is modern; it's origins were long ago, in a galaxy far far away...
Oh and I'm a strict constructionist Pastafarian myself, I guess that one's fairly new. Arrrr.
The black box should be ejected, or ejectable from the plane at certain acceleration levels if at all possible (accelerations such as those you would experience shortly after your "Hey, what's that sheep doing up in this cloud?" moment). The Lockheed D-21 supersonic drone used to drop the hatch containing spy cameras before landing, so there's build precedent. This would be in addition to filling the entire box with silicon rubber after assembly into it's own little alloy billet and all those other wonders our diseased minds can think of to isolate them from their little moment of hell.
Yes, I was seeing if I could get away with it -- sort of like trying to write a sentence without the letter "e".
Thanks for that, very useful. I will do my very best to effect that change, although the effect may be to effect a gerund somewhere. I distrust gerunds, believing them to be an affectation.
o Is liquid nitrogen legal? o What about high voltage? o Blue-tack? o What's the maximum weight of demolition hammer allowed? o Are battle-bots allowed to be equipped with smooth bore cannon? o Are capacitor-fed tack welders permitted? o Cowboy Neal?
I was being roundly sarcastic of course but I'm old & entitled to it.
But the scarier bit I put in was the "redundant IP addresses". Place I had a gig with recently had terrible DHCP response, so they kept buying DHCP servers. All replicated, right down to the address lists. 25 of them for a single smallish building. It was the most amazing case of whack-a-mole I ever saw, watching people booting each other off with address collisions. Nobody could depend on a connection for more than 10 minutes, if that. I just thank the Ultimate Noodle they were behind a NAT at least. And yes, I did tell them about it.
I categorically resent that. Historically our business transformation architecture achieves multipoint synergies by the close-tracking of business channel optimisation strategies, and our decision workshopping with regard to procurement of necessary infrastructure precludes the detail assessment quid-pro-quo with regard to non-executive decision makers. If I say we need duplicate DHCP servers then by god I want them to be exact duplicates, from their highly redundant address lists right down to the tiny little rubber feet!
And I have great hair! Just ... not much of it any more.
They are: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Childbirth/
Generally get a couple of weeks out of one bottle, and that's not a long time between drinks. Tap water is good enough for me, if I don't like it I'm not thirsty enough.
That does not pertain to occasional visits to Adelaide, of course -- I'm never thirsty enough for that stuff.
Hey, why do you think they call it the Department of Water and Power?
I was thinking of SQL Server primarily because of speed and reliability, but your comment "one size does not fit all" made me think about all that referential overhead of SQL Server vs. the rather flat structures of X.500 that Exchange used for meta. Think I'll go along with you there, too.
Wow I'm being agreeable today. Don't get used to it.
However they did eventually clean it up and you no longer had to worry quite as much about the IS falling apart like a badly stacked sandwich. Eventually the Exchange directory evolved into Active Directory because the MSFT strategy veered toward LDAP. In fact, the newest release has Exchange using the AD paths instead of internal connectors. It's evolving, and it still scales pretty well. I don't know if they have, but I'd think moving the engine to SQL Server would be a good idea if they haven't already. But they've got so much grief atm working on compliance issues (SOX, Basel 2 etc.) that I doubt they have a lot of spare time on their hands.
Oh, and I've done a few Lotus / Domino installations and a bit of L3 support too, and I honestly believe that Exchange at its worst is easier to manage than Notes at its best at the enterprise level. Personal experience, no formal measurements, but mostly I didn't like Notes' fire-and-forget admin interface (I like fast feedback) or the fragile security structure.
PST's used the old JET engine too (I think it was the same one used for MS Access) and I always found they became unreliable after about 50MB, and you did *not* want the PST on a network share (it wasn't supported anyway).
HAH! My speed is faster than your speed, and my modem is bigger too. And don't let me get started on the size of my hard drive, it's really, really big!
Ok, when I was little it was all about the size of your carburetor.
Get off my lawn.
An angel taking a leak is more newsworthy than the devil strangling a kitten.
Well, Mr. President, it's these bees and spiders again...
White dust the poor rich Barney lay its eggs in the eyre? HONK Delay. You have violated Robot's Rules of Order and will be asked to leave the future immediately.
Ref: soup-through-nose computer humour from the Nixon Administration - punch-card era stuff, remarkably visionary. Firesign Theatre, "I Think We're All Bozos On This Bus". Very strongly recommended.
Efficient? Sorry, what's that? Yes, I know we're just re-using heat that would otherwise be wasted, but we'd be getting multidimensional cool...
And NT was a port of VMS, check the history. Dave Cutler was the architect of both operating systems, and you'll see common parameter names in both VMS' Sysgen and the NT Registry, particularly around memory management.
Why was VMS secure and NT so very not? VMS was matched to the Vax hardware, which supported Kernel, Executive, Supervisor and User modes. Intel x86 chip set didn't support all those modes, which meant certain heavy duty machine instructions could be run in address spaces they shouldn't have shared with user code.
I would suggest that if there were a version of Windows written that would be acceptably secure, it would be in Microsoft's best interests to consider working with Intel to provide an instruction set that could do a better job of ring-fencing instructions and address space.
Hell yes. They teach you that in MBA 101, and the term is "throwing good money after bad". You do **not** spend more money on a project that will not net any returns, you cancel the accounting codes and flog the furniture (sell -- I meant sell the furniture).
Famous quote from W.Gates - "If we don't obsolete our own software, someone else will." I don't think they quite meant obsoleting it in advance, but there you go, apologies for the gerund.