[[sneck]]
Consider yourself lucky. One brokerage I did work for, the *MONTH-END* reporting took nearly a week to print -- when the printers weren't 'otherwise occupied' (e.g., overnite reporting, and various stuff that was needed in 'near real time'), that is. Year-end was something like
6 weeks, and growing.There was talk of adding additional printers, but _that_ required finding the space to put them -- the existing computer room was full to the gills,
*and* the A/C was taxed to the limit.
I've known of a number of micro-processors whee the 'BCD' opcodes were usable on any hex nybbles. Yeah, results were *NOT* "intuitively obvious' when what you call 'undigits' were involved, but they -were- consistent -- at least within the same processor model.
The CDC 6000 series didn't have BCD math hardware, but *somebody* had worked out some magic incantations whereby you could do simple arithmetic (addition/subtraction) on character strings of digits. i.e. take words with the strings '0000012345' and '0000056789' in them, perform a binary addition operation on them, followed by the 'magic incantation' instructions, and end up with a word holding the string '0000069134'.
I also knew folks that had worked out some _very_ creative uses for the 'undigit' handling done by some specific microprocessor chips.
sounds like a 'no bull' attempt to me. :)
The original Univac I had tape drives that maintained tension with springs and pulleys rather than vacuum columns. Those drives, as well as the vacuum column model that replaced them on Univac II, could read both forwards and backwards. There were 10 drives.
One of the programmers (no, not me) wrote a program that issued a write command, followed by a read backwards, followed by a skip a block. That sequence apparently exceeded the response of the strings and pulleys and they wound up in a heap at the bottom of the drive.
The resident (yep, 24 hours a day) CEs wouldn't believe him when he described the problem. So he wrote a little program to demonstrate the problem, called in the CEs, and ran the program, dumping *all 10* tape drives. He wasn't very popular with the CEs after that, but when he told them he had a problem, they listened :-).
I sometimes think all us old computer nerds should start a website and record all these stories before we all die and the stories are lost.
No, the 400 and 600 series - remember Multics? And the first Codasyl DBMS?
I think IBM had bought them by then, hadn't they?
There is also the story about a university student who got the engineering plans for an IBM mainframe disk drive (one of the washing-machine-size units), _carefully_ calculated the mass involved, and wrote a channel program that consisted of 'seek to outermost track', pause, 'seek to innermost track', pause, and "repeat indefinitely". The 'pause' times were carefully calculated to the 'resonant frequency of the drive unit. Reportedly, the unit 'walked' almost *THREE*FEET* across the floor, _towards_the_operator_, before they managed to find and kill the offending task. I'm given to understand that the operators were 'a bit nervous' for some days thereafter.
I managed to knock a selectric style printer off its stand with a little unfortunate development code.
The IBM-1130 used a 1-card IPL program that was normally used to fetch a resident supervisor image from disk, and I kept a stack of 'em on the console for convenience...
I also made a hobby of writing 1-card boot programs to do things like making a copy of the supervisor image in the last of three spare cylinders on the disk, restoring from same, copying card decks, gang-punching control cards... and a little program that would seek past the innermost track to nudge a little rubber bumper against the drive hub - repeatedly - to make a really nasty buzzing sound.
Not exactly sure how it happened to be on top of the stack of boot cards when our friendly FE came in to do scheduled PM. He grabbed a "joybuzzer" card to boot up the machine, and totally freaked out a second time when told "It does that sometimes". :)
He did take it more in stride the time he booted up the machine and the printer wasted a page to inform him that "Sometimes I feel like a motherless child"...
He did not take it so well when someone (caugh) patched the resident supervisor idle loop to do a WAIT when the machine was waiting for work (could be anything from an empty card reader hopper to the interval between card columns while actually reading a card). Seems like the runtime meter (from which IBM billed the school) stopped when the CPU was in a wait state. The school's billings had suddenly dropped mysteriously by 90% and the branch office manager was (very) upset about lost revenue. The FE really was friendly - he negotiated a "Wink, wink, nod, nod, promise not to share this with other customers and you can keep the 90% discount" agreement.
On 13 Apr 2010 20:38:49 GMT, the infamous snipped-for-privacy@slp53.sl.home (Scott Lurndal) scrawled the following:
Especially when other copies are available from the same page for $17 and change.
Are you saying that these three sellers are _not_ sleazes, trying to take advantage of Krenov's recent passing?
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- Press HERE to arm. (Release to detonate.) -----------
On Tue, 13 Apr 2010 13:39:53 -0700 (PDT), the infamous Robatoy scrawled the following:
3 off the top: What you don't like that Meg Belichick was paid $4k for her work "mudflap", which consisted of used rectangular rubber sheets and some bailing wire? You don't consider scat to be art? And handing out $5 bills to passersby isn't considered performance art? What's wrong with you, Toy?All I can say is
Few creative artists stray from an established theme. It is the core of their creativity and they will strive to 'better' that core, offer variations, but mostly their art will have identity of some sort. A Moore sculpture is relatively easy to identify. Many painters have a 'style' (some even call theirs 'De Stijl'.) Krenov had a style. Van Gogh had a style and to have the nerve to say that he did the same painting over and over will get you shot at dawn.
How many careers revolve around One Hit? (Now they call them a 'signature song'.)
They're milking it, folks! Wouldn't you?
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Andy Warhol was more an Artist. He took risks.
Craftsmen. Not artists. An Artist will take risks.
Is art about production? FWIW, I don't believe Krenov ever claimed to be an Artist.
I don't think so. CACI was known as the Old Sailor's Home, there were so many retired revolving door Navy officers there. They had a bunch of Iranian Navy stuff squirreled away in Pennsylvania. This was during and right after the Hostage Crisis.
I once caused a 6500 to lock out every other job by 'printing' a dozen or so boxes of blank paper. :(
Maybe before my time.
I do not think he would say that he sold "furniture". He called himself a "worker of wood", as opposed to a "woodworker". Evidently, to him there was a distiction. He was aware that many of his customers were people who might frequent art galleries--people who appreciated something finer...
What colour was it? Makes a difference in price.
Meh... you seen one pile of shit, you've seen them all.
FIVE bucks only? What a cheap-ass.
I would like to know what compelled you enter ANY word in your search engine that took you to that link?
Yeah, well I'm with Robatoy on this one. There are far too many self-proclaimed "artists" out there whose idea of "taking risks" is seeing how much of their no-talent crap we will swallow before we start questioning their right to call it "art". For my part, if I don't see the artistic _talent_ it took to create something, then I don't see any "art" at all.
I agree Warhol took chances and broke new ground. I quite like his stuff.
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