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.
Regards, Dermot.
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