Text 5301, 42 rader
Skriven 2010-02-25 06:43:10 av Bob Ackley (1:300/3)
   Kommentar till text 5242 av Robert Bashe (2:2448/44)
Ärende: Windows Update Fix
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Replying to a message of Robert Bashe to Ward Dossche:

 RB> Hey, I not only wrote fortran back in the early 1970s, but
 RB> was one of the guys who typed programs out of magazines in
 RB> the early days and even played with 68000 assembly language
 RB> for a while - don't get up on your high horse to me.

I taught myself FORTRAN back in the early 70s, then the AF sent me
to programming school - one of the first classes to be taught 'Top Down
Structured Programming,' which is the grandfather of Object Oriented
programming.

 WD>> You never worked your way through a 7,500 page compile
 WD>> print-out from the days that CRT's didn't exist as a
 WD>> computer peripheral and the best you had was a T200
 WD>> teletype.

 RB> Let's just say that 7,500 pages of code was _not_ really
 RB> typical for programs in the "good old days" - unless you're
 RB> talking about code of people who wrote every routine new
 RB> instead of using recursion. I'm not talking about operating
 RB> systems.

One of my first programming jobs involved extracting data from a report
and formatting it for message transmission.  We had thirteen different
programs (many written by the same fellow) extracting data from the same
data base and putting it into the same transmission format; the differences
between them were in the selection and sort criteria.  We got a request for
a new report, and took the opportunity to redesign all of them.  Under the 
new system we did one humongous extract and stuck a trailer containing all
conceivable select and sort criteria on the end of the extracted records; then
we ran the extracted data through a system utility that selected and sorted
what we wanted and ran that result through a program that formatted it for
transmission.  The new system replaced all of the original programs.  When
the user came to us some time later asking for a new report - and expecting
to be told we'd have it ready in about three months - we asked him if it
could wait until that afternoon (setting up a new job and new cards - yeah
punch cards, we still used them back in those days - for the selection/sort
step took maybe 15 minutes).  The user was impressed...

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 * Origin: Bob's Boneyard, Emerson, Iowa (1:300/3)