My very first job was on the original Reality, which was still running
in 1983 (believe it or don't!)

I was just the night-time computer operator, but I had access to TCL
obviously because I had to run queries and such at night (you can't
run them during the day because it slows the system too much).

At any rate, I discovered that "T" was a shortcut for "Time" and I
thought I'd check out what other shortcuts might exist. So I tried A,
B, C, and so on to see what they did at TCL.

Previously, a tech had setup some kind of shortcut which would "wipe
the disk" (that's what they said) in preparation for a new install.
The shortcut was "\" and of course I found it at midnight or some such
thing, and it just threw up a comment like "Working..." or whatever.
No way to abort it and it was time to go home anyway.

The next day I got a call early to ask "Did anything odd happen last
night?"

So the moral is, don't create shortcuts that do amusing things, like
reformatting the disk.

Will Johnson

On A more Reliable note for those that remember punched cards and
assembler. A programmer at a large steel mill in Wales spent six months
writing his program and tracing a fault. Every time he ran the program it
kicked off splendidly then the machine halted (more sad memories of Open
Architecture) One day a great cheer rang around the programmers room he
had found it. The procedure he had to follow in the end was to take the
deck of cards and laboriously align every one with a ruler to check the
code as punched. Bingo! one miss punch produced a command that only the
system engineers knew about ; System Halt
Peter McMurray
"frosty" <frostyj at (no spam) bogus.tld> wrote in message
news:qtednWg3kvGMJ3TXnZ2dnUVZ_uSdnZ2d at (no spam) centurytel.net...
On Oct 28, 7:07 pm, wjhonson <wjhon... at (no spam) aol.com> wrote:

Previously, a tech had setup some kind of shortcut which would "wipe
the disk" (that's what they said) in preparation for a new install.
The shortcut was "\"

Kevin Powick wrote:
I worked on a system where somebody did that with the "D" key. Every
production file was cleared and re-loaded with a base set of data.
Not good.


Eric Idle Voice>You were lucky! On our system, any one key command
would erase the entire hard drive and set the computer room on
fire!</EIV

--
frosty

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

On Oct 31, 10:04 am, Art Martz <artma... at (no spam) triad.rr.com> 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

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

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... at (no spam) gmail.com> wrote:
On Oct 31, 10:04 am, Art Martz <artma... at (no spam) triad.rr.com> 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

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

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

BTW, here's a link to a PROC & Batch manual:
http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/microdata/reality/771044_realityProcBatch_77.pdf
Ed

...My dad, retired from NASA, used to work with an IBM mainframe that
had a JCL language called ProcDef, which to me looked a lot like
PROC. On the same mainframe, there was a documentation processor
called "Runoff". Guess what it looked like? I think Dick and Don did
a little "borrowing" when they wrote Girls.

Art Martz wrote:
...My dad, retired from NASA, used to work with an IBM mainframe that
had a JCL language called ProcDef, which to me looked a lot like
PROC. On the same mainframe, there was a documentation processor
called "Runoff". Guess what it looked like? I think Dick and Don did
a little "borrowing" when they wrote Girls.

I'm quite familiar with RUNOFF, and don't see how it can be compared
to GIRLS. Care to explain?

--
frosty

Hey Will,

Good news .... you have found someone else who knows about SNOBOL
But my reference is later, "just" past punched cards, running on an
early DEC-11 on RTSE (? I just remember calling is "rastus")

One of the other software companies in town had a comprehensive system
written in Snobol - believe this may have originated from USA ...
perhaps MCBA? (Mini Computer Business Associates)

Bell Labs.

I could never figure out how to make money with it.  What "comprehensive
system" stuff did they do?

It's a string-processing (!) language used in exploring patterns, as in
language recognition.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SNOBOL