off topic: new car advice for senior

[rbowman]

A moment of silence for DEC...

[rbowman]

I worked for a company where the CEO's son was a Harvard MBA. The company had over expanded right before the plastics industry took a hit with the oil embargo and was having problems. Sonny boy was brought in to fix things. It took him about a year to fix us into Chapter 11.

Prior to that he'd helped another company. I don't think it was Jim Fixx but there was some fairly famous runner who had started a couple of runners' stores in Boston. The kid helped him expand the operation into bankruptcy too.

[Don Y]

There was a logic family (for sea of gates implementations) called STL. Basically, single transistors (inverters!) that you would wire together (on the die) to form gates. Tying collectors together ("wired-or"), inverting inputs/outputs, etc.

It was grossly inefficient -- but very versatile.

[Don Y]

(sigh) I had a 3000 AXP that I *swear* you could use for a jack stand, in a pinch! Damn thing almost required two people to carry it (exaggeration)! 256 bit wide memory -- back in the 90's!

[Don Y]

I designed a Z80 box that had 16K of RAM that was EXPANDABLE IN 6KB (six) increments! (think about how I did *that*! :>)

[Jack]

Yah, that's quite common. Dad starts a business, devotes all his time and energy to it and ignores his kids. As we all know, ignored children are often under-performers. Few people can have their cake and eat it too.

[Ed Pawlowski]

DEC, DG, Wang are at the forefront of technology. Big (and smart) companies that will go on forever.

As Ken Olsen wisely pointed out "why would anyone want a computer on their desk?" Such a great vision.

[rbowman]

The iShuffle is so simple it isn't difficult to use. However the MP3 players I use most often are Sansas. Plug them into the USB port and they look like any other mass storage device. iirc I had to use iTunes to load the iShuffle and iTunes has to be the most complicated, counter-intuitive software I've ever used.

[rbowman]

Trigraphs remind me of the Escape Meta Alt Control Shift thing that plays Go, tells your fortune, feeds the cat, and is customizable if you're fluent in Martian.

Funny, that came up in a conversation yesterday when I told another programmer about APL. That required digraphs on most keyboards and I mentioned trigraphs. He asked what you'd use those for and when I said emacs, he shuddered.

[rbowman]

It wasn't all bad but I took one 'three month' project at GE Ft. Wayne that lasted for over a year. Indiana is a little short on mountains and trees, both of which are required for my sanity. A year later the guy called me up again to sort out some BASIC. While I was somewhat happy to find BASIC had advanced past needing line numbers unraveling somebody else's mess in a language you're not that familiar with was interesting. Paid well though and I managed to swing by Mardi Gras on my way back to New Hampshire.

I got drafted into being a manger a few years ago after avoiding it all my life. The 'junior' programmer has been there 15 years so mostly I just carry on as a working programmer. Especially with the guys working on the Android and phone stuff I don't have a clue what they're doing most of the time. I fix a few of the easier Java bugs every now and then to retain some familiarity with the code base but I really prefer languages that start with C -- C, C++, C#. And, no, I've never touched COBOL.

[rbowman]

Well when you get down to the nitty gritty a FPGA isn't much more than that.

[sms]

One CS professor at my university called APL TPL (THE programming language). He also hosted weekly gatherings at the campus pub, which were dubbed APL (alcoholic programmers league). It was interesting to read comments on his obituary page regarding APL .

[Don Y]

Yes, the iShuffle is the one that looks like a glorified "tie tack"? (no display, USB connection is made through the *earphone* connector?)

I have two Sansa's. IIRC, one of them needed a "music converter" to get the tunes into the correct format (?). They also have an entertaining animation when they power up/down (?)

Look into Floola (free) to maintain your iPod(s). iTunes is more of the "everything Apple" mentality -- make you feel like you are ALWAYS in a store! MS did something similar with the Zune -- which *could* have been an interesting device (but for being locked into MS's little world).

[Don Y]

I had a Trendata 1200 (aka "Selectric I/O") with an APL typeball. Not the sort of thing folks were comfortable "reading over your shoulder" (why does that key generate that weird upside down triangle??")

[clare]

The one that was built upside-down and inside-out?? Motherboard on the top if I remember corectly - strange critters they were.

[clare]

A well earned reputation too.

[clare]

Programming on the Moto processors was a lot easier - direct addressing with no offsets - no reverse polish notation.

[clare]

We built some of the last DEC PCs for them.

[Don Y]

Yeah, I turned down a job offer designing televisions in Indiana. Didn't look like a place I'd want to spend much time -- let alone *live*! (apologies to folks there!)

Puzzles (for the sake of being a puzzle) have only limited appeal. I've had to reverse engineer projects from bare metal (draw schematic from an analysis of foils, decompile software from ROM dumps, etc.). The first time is challenging. The second is just tedious (you already *know* you CAN do this so a lot of emphasis goes on the "Why" you're doing it -- again!)

I prefer C to any of the others as it lets me imagine what code the compiler is *likely* to generate. I don't have to worry that some anonymous object is being constructed "between the lines" or some overloaded cast is burning hundreds of machine cycles between one arithmetic operator and the next, etc. (I do real-time embedded systems)

Presently using C, ASM, Limbo (C-ish) and SQL on my current project. Makes it interesting to keep track of what's "legal" at any given time! :>

[clare]

Sorry, it was Data General we made the PCs for, not Digital Equipment

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