Posts by Tim99

Re: Nothing new, kinda pathetic really

Thank you for the the Vax anecdote. We had a 11/750 for general computing and admin which could get a *bit slow*. Although it seemed fast compared to the DEC PDP-8/11 stuff that I used before then.

One day the main IT bod came over to ask (aggressively/pointedly) why I had just written a case for a DG Nova 4 for data acquisition. He insisted on looking at a raw output oscillograph scan which would be converted into about 500 7 digit numbers (raw centroided peaks). He said that it was easy to do on the 11/750 so I didn't need the Nova 4. He asked what turnaround would be acceptable? It was real-time. How many sets of data? One every 2 seconds for an hour, run 5-6 times a day. I got the Nova 4, but he did argue that a 25 MB 19" rack-mounted Winchester disk was more than we needed, so he sourced 5MB Phoenix drives - I Could fill them in 3 days, 2 months later I got the Winchester drive, which also became too small, but I could dump data off onto tape...

Re: So

We used to call them "bottom up" systems. They always seemed much more successful than the "top down" stuff that was produced when talking to "Managers”. I learnt to write what looked like two systems (but in reality different menus) - One for the people "doing the work", and one for their bosses (normally lots of reports, and a few fancy templates to allow them to harmlessly squirt static stuff into Excel so they weren’t tempted to "what if" change things).

Re: Stop Gap

A year or so after yours, we wrote a ‘quick prototype’ in MS Access for a franchisee. The intention was to evaluate what was required, and that production systems would then be built with PowerBuilder or VB/C with an Oracle or POSTGRES backend for some of the other franchises.

After a month of playing with it, the punter asked why they couldn’t use it in production. It took a few days to separate the forms/VBA/reports into a front-end system, put the back-end data onto a server, and build redundancy. It was good for about 50 thousand rows in the main active table and 5 concurrent users. A couple of extra weeks got the back-end replaced by SQL Server 4.2 on NT Workstation. This was the basis of the system taken up by the franchiser and the rest of the franchisees. As their businesses grew, the central franchiser’s server version had scaled to 10s of millions of active rows with a hundred or so distributed users (some with Terminal Services) by the time I had retired. Other systems used MS Small Business Server. The only problem was that we had to persuade the punters that they needed a whopping 8MB of RAM in each client MS Access PC, when they were used to only 4MB. Smaller systems were able to use existing equipment with the central Terminal Services servers.

Many of our systems for the next ten years followed this pattern, with the clients using the runtime versions of Access. They always came in at a fraction of the cost of VB/C or PowerBuilder, and easily integrated with Excel and MS Word. With a proper installation tool, they were stable enough to ship as shrink-wrap - One product is now installed on over 1,500 PCs on many sites across Australia - Most of our support calls (a few a week) were Windows or networking problems…

Re: Ctrl-Z?

If the deities intended the control to be under the tab (VT05); whose idea was it to put the caps lock next to it (VT52), and then make it twice as big so that it overlapped to where the control should be (VT100)?

Re: Apple sucks balls.

Perhaps. IBM’s lawyers are sometimes called the Nazgûl… The Nazgûl came again ... like vultures that expect their fill of doomed men's flesh.

<cynicism>Do you really think that the monies will get spent on research?</cynicism>

Re: Ctrl-Z?

Quite right too - The way that the <DEITIES> intended...

Re: Ctrl-Z?

It may depend on the age of the computer? On my 2+ year old iMac the flc are labelled "command". The option keys have a graphic that looks like a sunken swan. A much older wired keyboard uses mostly text with few symbols - it only has the flc...

NFN (Normal for Norfolk)

Sorry to rain on your meme, but…

My father was the Treasurer of a Norfolk Council when documents were still hand written or typed. He was responsible for the installation of one of the first local authority systems (in the mid/late 1960s, Burroughs?). It’s main job was to look after the rates, and pay bills and salaries - It worked. I was just getting into science/technology then, and was allowed to go and see it working in its own room. The manufacturer was sufficiently pleased that it was used as a reference site, and for some reason "gave" them an ANITA calculator to "check everything was OK" - I think that cost about £400. He took early retirement when local authorities were reorganised in 1973 (Redcliffe-Maud). He predicted that the new large authorities would become an inefficient bureaucratic mess, so he grabbed the pension and left. When he left he was allowed to buy the ANITA for £5 and was still using it in 1991.