off topic: new car advice for senior

[Don Y]

The 32K was better, still! None of the address/data register schizophrenia!

[larrymoencurly]

lace her standard old car. She is very good driver with very clean driving history. Her current car is Volkswagen golf. She is thinking of buying a ne w Volkswagen golf but automatic of course (easier to drive). Do you have an y other recommendation on which car (brand name) she should consider. Too m any options and technologies are not really required, just basic stuff but most be automatic.

The best hatchbacks are probably the VW Golf, Mazda3, Hyundai Elantra GT, and Ford Focus. The Golf and Focus are the quietest and best riding, but neither is reliable, and VW parts can be the most expensive. The Honda Fit would be great if it wasn't so loud and rough riding. If she doesn't mind sedans, a Toyota Corolla or Subaru Impreza might be good, but sedans are worse than ever for cargo because trunk lids have become shorter, making it harder to get large cargo in and out.

[Scott Lurndal]

This all leaves out so much computing history:

Electrodata (late 50's) 220 Burroughs B5000/B5500/B300/B3500 (early 60's) GE-600 series (GE-635 was the internet equivalent in 1965) CDC-6600 (PLATO was the internet equivalent in the 1970's) Honeywell (nee Datamatic) 800, 200, DPS systems IBM 1401, 7094 RCA Spectra 70, RCA series NCR 315 (1962) ICL Groupe Bull Univac III, 1100/2200

[Don Y]

The 5500 was an interesting machine in how it dynamically maintained dependencies between (independent) "execution units"

And, of course, Mutt Licks! Too bad no one has tried to port it to more modern hardware (36b is a wee bit odd!)

Mmmmm.... "Empire"! ;-)

[Scott Lurndal]

In addition to Multics, Dartmouth Basic was developed on the 635.

I prefered DnD, myself.

And Notes was a direct predecessor of Usenet.

[Don Y]

Oh, I didn't realize that. I'd have imagined a smaller machine!

The plasma displays were just *so* appropriate for Empire!

[rbowman]

Nothing like going from 'America's most successful entrepreneur' to 'what an idiot' in a few short years.

There is also a legend that Ward Christensen's proudest possession is a memo from his boss at IBM telling him if he wanted to mess around with

8080's on his own time it was okay but the microprocessors were never going to go anyplace.

IBM is about the only dinosaur left standing and I'm not sure why. 15 years ago all our clients were running RS/6000 systems and we were developing for AIX. I can't remember the last time we did an AIX build and we shut down the last RS/6000 boxes three years ago. They may or may not boot anymore but it's an academic question.

They were nice systems but when dealing with IBM you always got the idea you were dealing with the red headed step child division until you saw the invoice.

[rbowman]

The owner of the first company I worked for had been an engineer at GE, took an idea GE didn't think was worth pursuing, and turned it into a good sized enterprise. Son #1 turned out to have the hobby of raping middle aged women in parking lots. He was never found legally guilty but decided to live 1200 miles away from upstate NY. #2 wasn't doing too well in a junior college meat cutting course so he dropped out and became a VP. #3 was actually human and stayed away from the circus.

The old man drove his Lincoln into the garage one night, closed the door, and forgot to turn the engine off. I wondered if he'd been happier just drawing a GE check.

[Don Y]

IBM has a constancy. There is little fear that they are going to "go away" and leave you "hanging".

The first time a client asked me, straight out, "What do we do if you get hit by a bus?", I laughed. I thought it a joke. But, realized he was deadly serious -- what *would* they do if I got hit by a bus? Sure, I could arrange for all of the work I'd done for them (even those things for which I'd not yet been *paid*!) to exist in an escrow account in their behalf. But, there's no *entity* ready to step into my shoes and finish the work -- in anything akin to the timetable on which they had initially planned!

With IBM, if your tech/salesperson/rep got hit by a bus, a new "droid" would magically appear and introduce itself to you. Nothing for you to "worry about".

IBM's designs (those that I've been exposed to) are also pretty "vanilla". And, their "process" is significantly disciplined so there isn't much risk of something existing *solely* in ONE GUY'S head (making that guy indispensible).

All of these things conspire to leave you with a reasonably "safe" path forward -- regardless of what might befall the company or its employees.

[rbowman]

Nah, PL/I is TPL. IBM was always humble naming their languages.

Then there is the TIL, FORTH. Charlie Moore isn't too modest either. I had people pay me real money to use that one at least.

[rbowman]

It was different. There actually was a lot to do, buckskinner rendevous, all sorts of car racing, museums, etc. Fairmount had a big James Dean festival since that was his boyhood hometown. I caught Bill Monroe down in Beanblossom before the place went upscale. Auburn has a great car museum. Some people in a little town near Ft. Wayne restored a steam engine and some of the fancy old passenger cars, and would take it for a spin every now and then. I took it down along the Wabash to Peru where the Circus Hall of Fame is. There were a couple of tunnels and they'd pull through, let everyone out, back up, and come out again so the train nuts had a photo op of a steamer coming out of a tunnel.

Except for the southern part down near Nashville it was real short on trees and hills. I learned to fly in the Vermont mountains but Indiana really spooked me. You could land almost anyplace in an emergency instead of trying to land on the side of a tree covered mountain but there was just too much nothing.

I'll also mention in passing that it was the most Christian place I've ever lived.

Working with C and ASM has made me cynical. I look at syntactic sugar like try/catch constructs and my mind says 'there's a prettified goto in there someplace'.

I haven't used Limbo, but I know more about ODBC than i ever wanted to. We have a separate department that handle the records management heavy lifting but somebody had to populate the tables with the live data and that somebody is usually me.

We're looking at a web interface so I've also been playing with JavaScript in all its glory. There are a lot of ways to skin the cat, both server side and client side, and I'm trying to pick the method that isn't going to fade into the sunset like Silverlight.

[rbowman]

That's the one.

I never ran into that. I'm a dinosaur so I buy CDs mostly and rip them. I just copy the mp3 files over. I've got an old Creative Zen Nano that is the same.

[rbowman]

Did I mention I've done a bit of FORTH programming :) I even have an old HP 16C programmer's calculator. Great fun leaving that lying around and watching someone try to use it. For extra credit, leave it set to hex.

5 5 + A ???? WTF?

[rbowman]

They weren't bad but DEC shot themselves with that ploy of having pre-formatted floppies only available through DEC. Anybody who lived through the CP/M era with the 23 different formats because everyone tweaked the WD2791 a little different wasn't buying into another proprietary format.

At one point we we assembling cables for DEC Augusta. The QA was strict but we finally got a crew that put out cables with almost no rejects. Then the plant manager got the bright idea that they should give the contract to a Native American operation in interest of diversity. I'll leave it to your imagination how well that worked out.

[rbowman]

Another footnote. I got a kick out of Dukakis campaigning on the 'Massachusetts Miracle' when everybody in the industry knew the miracle was rapidly turning to a debacle. Personally, I decided to retire for a while and left New Hampshire in '88 looking for greener pastures.

[rbowman]

And a dark day that was.

[rbowman]

Like they say, nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM. Or, these days, Windows.

[Roger Blake]

Ken Olsen was correct, just ahead of his time, as evidenced by the growing popularity of so-called "cloud computing." Most people really do not want the hassle and responsibility that having their own computer entails. What they really want is the capability, but provided by a terminal that is easy to use and as maintenance-free as possible with someone else handling the messy details of security, backups, etc. on the other end.

[Don Y]

They're "pitch" was the Indy.

I grew up in CT so understand. Can't see more than a *block* down a ROAD in any given direction!

Ah! Definitely not the sort of thing that would sit well with me.

Limbo (and SQL) require a significant mental adjustment, for me. Limbo is C-ish (same pedigree) but also has built in GC, *no* pointers (being a hardware person, I rely on pointers almost to a fault!), lots of automagic behind the scenes, inherent support for concurrency (e.g., "spawn" is a keyword), communication channels, "tuples" (including use as return types!), lists, loadable modules, etc.

But, to do so, there is a fair amount of extra syntax embellishment! E.g., to implement a DTMF encoder, one might:

// declare function "encode" taking one "char" argument called "key" // and returning a tuple comprised of an error/success code (int) and // two "frequency" data types (obviously a user-defined type) encode(key: char) : (int, frequency, frequency) { // create some result codes as 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, ... SUCCESS, FAIL: con 0;

// declare a "result" variable as an int type (inferred from SUCCESS) // instantiate it and define it as having the value "SUCCESS" result := SUCCESS;

// declare/instantiate row and column variables for the DTMF frequencies // but don't assign any values! column, row: frequency;

// map specific keys to appropriate *row* frequencies (switch!) case key { '1' or '2' or '3' => row = TOP_ROW; '4' or '5' or '6' => row = SECOND_ROW; '7' or '8' or '9' => row = THIRD_ROW; '*' or '0' or '#' => row = BOTTOM_ROW; * => error = FAIL; }

// map specific keys to appropriate *column* frequencies (switch!) case key { '1' or '4' or '7' or '*' => column = LEFT_COLUMN; '2' or '5' or '8' or '0' => column = MIDDLE_COLUMN; '3' or '6' or '9' or '#' => column = RIGHT_COLUMN; * => error = FAIL; }

return (error, row, column); }

I.e., you can *guess* what is happening (with an understanding of C) but would get the syntax wrong without explicit knowledge of it (e.g., look at "var: int" declarations instead of "int var", "case" where you'd expect "switch", "* =>" instead of a "default:" case, etc.)

I don't deal with ODBC as everything is "my own" -- OS, sql interface module, etc. -- except the PostgreSQL RDBMS. As everything is "deeply embedded", I can't afford to let some sloppy piece of code gobble up resources carelessly without being intimately aware of it's actions (and justification for doing so).

Yup, same here. Being a hardware type, I love finite automata. So, most of my algorithms are table driven -- tweek the table to change the overall algorithm.

In this project, I decided to do away with ALL persistent storage (no file system, etc.) relying exclusively on the RDBMS for "persistence". This has the advantage of providing structure to the data (no need to "parse" configuration files -- just create a table with appropriately named/typed/constrained! columns and read it with a SELECT!).

And, it also lets me move all the "const data" that would normally drive my algorithms *into* the RDBMS! So, I can change a table in the RDBMS and effectively change the behavior of my code -- without having to RECOMPILE any of it!

E.g., if I want to change the rules that are used to convert a string of letters into a particular set of sounds, I don't have to alter the

*code* that does that; just alter the *table* that it loads at run-time from the RDBMS and, voila! :>

*Everything* in my current design is C-S. My RTOS makes it easy for me to move big objects around quickly and easily (I can even move a "program" from one node to another with a single function call!)

Each "node" is nominally ~500MHz, 256MB FLASH, 256MB DRAM with a Gb ethernet port (loosely coupled/distributed... not SMP). As I can power up (remote) nodes at will, I can bring more horsepower on-line as my processing needs dynamically increase -- and, "move" programs to whichever nodes have the most "spare resources" at the time.

[It's opportunities like this that lead me to NOT stick with a "tried and true" client base!]

[Don Y]

This split keeps flipping back and forth every few years as technology and personnel costs change. Wait until some "cloud" is seriously breached: I can see the adverts, now: "It's 6PM -- do you know where your DATA is??"