Posts by swm

Re: Way back when...

A lot of the old strowager exchanges had a mechanism to "absorb digits. In one exchange with 60,000 subscribers) dialing "2" would just be ignored; dialing "4" would also be ignored but would take the next digit (even 2 or 4). So dialing 242-xxxx would result in 2 (ignored), 4 (ignored but prime for the next digit), 2 (would actually step to the second level and go on to the next bank of switches).

This could cause connections to numbers only loosely related to what was dialed.

I actually saw this exchange (I think in Albuquerque, NM, about 50 years ago) and it was an amazing sight and sound. Continuous clickity-clacks and alerts etc. Amazing that they could keep this acre of equipment working.

Re: New Normal?

Then there are the managers who object to side conversations: "Let's have only one meeting here."

Re: Advertent FUD

"Most tapwater in the US is good quality."

Tell that to the residents of Flint Michigan. The government actually hid problems with their water quality.

Re: Out of Office...

Mail on the original ARPANET had a problem with two people responding to "out of office" messages with "out of office" messages (ccing all of the other recipients). Things filled up fast until protocols were developed not to respond to automatically generated messages.

Re: Then, there is Chess...

Black goes first in GO.

Re: Not quite the same...

"Similar vintage a friend got the Fortran control characters wrong so it threw a new page instead of a new line."

This was quite common as the first column was generally used as a page control. If there was a number there it could cause this one line per page problem. Or even worse, overprinting on the same line until the paper tore through.

Re: not the terminal, the punch card

"Cutting eight characters to four and allowing lines to go longer allows you to keep these sources of bugs at bay."

I actually use 2 spaces per indent. But then again it is my code. I will follow coding standards for any group project.

In high school we squirted HCl acid onto pieces of sodium and it made little fireballs.

Re: At least..

In the late 1960's a NE Yellowbird flight into Lebanon, NH, came into a VOR landing. The airspace was protected out to 10 miles from the VOR as specified on the charts. Unfortunately the pilot made his turn 12 miles out and clipped the top of a mountain. Everyone died.

Re: Ah, customers.

'As my grandmother would have said, "Them as can, do. Them as can't, teach."'

I heard this as, "Those that can't learn, teach. Those that can't teach teach teachers."

Referring to the public school system.

Re: Minimum spec?

Xerox wrote their STAR office products using the XDE (Xerox Development Environment). The development environment was blazingly fast but the actual user code was abysmally slow because the developers never used it.

Re: Not unbelievable

At Dartmouth the physics department in the 1970's would use Baker Tower as a target for their ruby lasers. They would chip paint off of the tower from >100 yards.

Re: Only 45 years late?

I remember writing a Z80 simulator (in Sigma-7 FORTRAN) and running MS-BASIC on it. It worked but was very slow. This was about the time of the ALTAIR computers. One problem was turning the paper tape object code into a file.

Re: Oops!

During WW2 my father was commander of a submarine base in Australia. He had complaints of torpedoes that would do a 360 and "whoosh" over the firing sub. Turned out that it was due to poor training/maintenance which locked the gyro so the torpedo would make a hard right or left rudder after launch. The technical details of the poor maintenance are interesting but too long to report here.

Re: Fake news

Winnie the Pooh discovered the East Pole.

I once did an assembler run of a small program and forgot to include the character set card. Caused 2-3 errors per line.

Re: obvious

At Xerox we had Dorado computers (an ECL machine about the speed of a 68030). One of my colleagues reprogrammed the microcode for the mouse to reverse the X direction (just to see if he could). The only way to get the mouse to work intuitively was to run it on the underside of a table.

Re: Obligatory XKCD

Originally, IBM gave away software (FORTRAN etc.) to sell their machines.

Re: Labels people, and read them!

When I worked for Xerox we had two DHCP servers serving the same machines. Whichever one got there first served the required data. Seemed to work but this was back in the days when Xerox had a class A network (13.*.*.*) so no one was conserving IP addresses.

But it seats 12.

When I was in a control tower in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in the late 1960's the radar reliably showed returns off of planes near Chicago, Illinois about 60 miles away. With a light pen we could even see the transponder codes there. They used a moving target canceller that deleted returns from non-moving objects. When that was turned off I could see all of the street buildings in down town Milwaukee and nothing useful for about 4 miles because of ground returns.

I imagine that RADAR technology is much better now.

Re: The question should be "Who has never made a coding mistake?"

When I was teaching computer science I would write, from scratch, a 20-30 line program and compile it without errors. I then told the class that I was very good but that I have about a 50% success rate in writing short "perfect" programs. I then said, "Suppose my driving was like my coding ability - 50% of my trips resulted in no crashes?" You really have to test, test, test. Even then someone else will find bugs in your code.

Re: Nice technology

They actually set up a laser link between two buildings at Xerox PARC (I think in the 1970's). When there was fog the beam was visible and freaked out drivers driving under the beam.

Re: WTF

"It's natural and readable to separate parameters with commas."

And then there is LISP

I LOVE my brick!

Just download the latest windows 10 update.

Re: In 1999 the Internet was thirty years old

In 1968 in Urbana Illinois I was at a meeting on the design of the ARPANET. I believe that the first packets were exchanged within a year or two of that date.

Re: About ten years back

I believe that someone at MIT was bringing up a new machine and needed an IP address. They reasoned that a popular machine decommissioned 10 years ago had an IP address they could use. So they brought up the machine and immediately started getting mail that was dormant somewhere in the network for 10 years.

Re: excited us Biologists

If you start with the XKCD figure and let it run a few generations everything disappears except for a single glider headed north east. I thought that was very appropriate.