Ian Thompson-Bell wrote:
[...]
And do you remember the two pass paper tape assembler!!!
No, I'm afraid you've got me there. I was an operator on a Cobol site - but we did have a systems analyst who sent the same job down to us again and again for a day or two until we asked him what he was doing.
It turned out that he had dropped his program (2000 IBM cards) and was sending them down, wrapped in a little sort job, so that he got a print of the sort errors (sequence no in cols 72 or somesuch). He would then rearrange those cards and send it down again... :)
He wasn't a (complete) idiot but hard disks were so new then, he could only work with mag tape, and had no concept of random access files.
I have still got a chess program on paper tape, about 4kchars, that beat me but would stop a state-of-the-art (1977) ICL mainframe in its tracks. I think that that says more about the multi-tasking policies of OSes in those days than my chess abilities.
Those were the days hey? My wife worked as a tape librarian at ICL in Letchworth so I have heard similar stories about George 3 (which was something of a revelation when it first came out).
My first job was working on a newly designed 16 bit mini developed by BAC for automatic testing of rapier missiles. It was great pioneering fun developing printer, cassette tape and other interfaces (like you siad hard drives had not been invented then). You could even input machine code on switches on the front panel.
Ian
Ian Thompson-Bell
The Technology Partnership plc Melbourn Science Park Melbourn Herts SG8 6EE United Kingdom
Tel: +44 1763 262626 Fax: +44 1763 261582
mailto:itb@techprt.co.uk
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