Re: Any disastrous or amusing upgrade stories?

C'mon

I led the guys writing Autoflow for the 360, and later spent a lot of time helping to sell it. (it was one of the 'products' that helped us win a lawsuit against IBM - to stop promising software for free - that established the market for product software.) Autoflow automatically drew flowcharts of programs of a variety of languages. On one sales call / demonstration I was asked the highly technical question by a pointy-haired boss: why, on a particular page, we had left so much white space. I of course gulped at this attack on my product' aesthetics, took a step forward, and declared that the empty area was "meaningful space", as important as any other part of the chart. My salesman nearly choked at this reference to Holmes' dog that did not bark.

PHP and apache and frameworks are exciting, but my mind does drift sometimes back to the good old days.

~ ~ Bill


roales wrote:
Not only do I remember the colored X's on the side of decks - I
remember card gauges and card needles. Both used to check the
alignment of the punches and to calibrate the machines.

I also remember in my early years of working in assembler on an IBM
360 that you might only get one test run every other day or at the
most daily. You sure learned to desk check your work. And suck up
the keypunch operator that was going to key your coding sheets.
Alot of the habits that I formed in those days are still with me -
like desk checking the code and working with a set of test data with
known results. Pick is so easy that alot of programmers work from the
seat of their pants with sometimes really bad results. Just because it
compiles and runs doesn't mean that it ran correctly.

Anyone remember the "dupe" function of keypunching? It seems to have
been left behind but I still sometimes put that in a data entry
program for the type of field where a great majority of reponses are
the same but not all. For instance, you are entering addresses from
employees in a state, most of those will live in that state, but not
all.

Anyone remember flow charting?

On Oct 31, 10:39 am, dawn <dawnwolth...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Oct 31, 10:04 am, Art Martz <artma...@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

RJ wrote:
For those of us who remember punched cards, we also remember to "sight
check".
The IBM programming course for the 702 in 1954 spent two hours on error
checking for each one hour on programming. The part of the course that
gave most of the students trouble was the checking of the validity of a
tape or card read.
Bobj
Any one else remember drawing a big "X" on the side of the card deck so
that if you happened to drop or otherwise shuffle the deck, you stood a
chance of getting the cards back into the correct order?
Art
Yes, and it made me laugh audibly to read that. Many real pickies will
not recall this, however, given that Pick, unlike the RDBMS, did not
arise from the world of computer cards (or at least that is one thing
my research has lead me to believe). cheers! --dawn

.

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