Time in Pick

#31

On Mar 1, 4:34 pm, "Rob Allen" <robertwallen2... (AT) yahoo (DOT) com> wrote:

Quote:

And believe it or not, as of ten years ago we still had clients who
used Decwriters for certain tasks. I'll try to find out if there are
any left.

I checked with our printer expert in tech support, and he says we do
indeed still have Decwriters in use. He says they're the most reliable
printers ever built.

Rob Allen
ADP Dealer Services
Portland, OR

#32

On Mar 2, 2:49 am, Luke Webber <l... (AT) webber (DOT) com.au> wrote:

Quote:

Tony Gravagno wrote:
"Gandalf" wrote:
In 1973, I don´t know if 1200 baud even existed...
I looked it up on the Internet, and my memory was failing... they
functioned at around 13 characters per second, not 12 bits per
second..., so around 120 baud connection...

At 12 baud you could have started a job in 1973 and still be waiting
today for the results. LOL

I guarantee you weren't up on 1200 in '73. We were still on 110,
upgrading to 300 in the late 70's. 1200 was around 80-82? 2400
within a few years after that.

It could have been 1200/75, perhaps? 1200 baud with a 73 baud
backchannel, such as was used for the old Viatel stuff.

Cheers,
Luke

No - it was a 110 baud modem with an acoustic coupler... the Selectric
terminal couldn't go any faster than that anyway...
I don't know if 300 baud modems were available in 1973 either...
I was 11 yrs old then, taking night courses in Electrical Engineering
at the state university, and learning to drink lots of coffee (good
training for later years! ;-) )

Later on, when I got my first PC, I had a succession of modems, first
a Hayes 300 baud Smartmodem (in 1983), then a 1200 baud Hayes in 1984,
right when
they first came out, a 2400 baud Hayes in 1985, and finally in 1986 I
got an over 18K baud modem (proprietary protocol), the Telebit
Trailblazer (wonderful modem that... worked very well over bad phone
lines).

Amazing how things have changed in the last 25 years, isn't it!

I remember back then, practically being a slave to the computers
(having to stay up til 2am to be able to get time on the mainframe),
and now, the computers
have really freed me - I'm able to work whenever and wherever I want,
with hi-speed cellular broadband or WiFi, pretty much anywhere in the
world
(Here in Spain, I often go to a bar, plug in my laptop, and get served
coffee and "pinchos" (tapas) while I work... can't really beat that
for an office!)

Scott

#33

Jim Idle wrote:

Quote:

I wrote my first code in 1975...

I remember back in 1490, when my old mate Chris stopped by and said:
"Hey Jimi! Fancy going on a cruise?" (only it was in Spanish and
sounded a lot cooler). "Yo Chris", says I (and now you know where that
West Coast dude speak came from), "why would you want a froody
programmer dude like me along?" Once he had looked it up in the
Spanish<->Dudely dictionary he explained "Well me old mate, that
Harrison bloke hasn't turned up with his frictionless geared clock
yet, so we thought we might need another Yorkshireman to invent a few
things for us."

This of course was the birth of GPS based navigation software. This of
course was not my first sojourn into programming, nor would it be the
last. I suppose the first program I wrote was the Sieve of Idle,
although I lost the rights to the algorithm in a bet with that old
cardsharp Eratosthenes over how far the Moon was away from the Earth.
He had just guessed of course and I had to invent laser telemetry to
prove him wrong. How we laughed when by a complete accident the
distance was exactly 734,000 times (converted to cubits) the length of
time in arc-seconds taken to travel from Athens to Delphi by mule...
and that was the exact number he had plucked out of his head.

When I told my other, less talented, pal old Pythagoras (actually we
used to call him Py for short, which annoyed the heck out of him
because he hadn't had anything to do with pi and thought that it was a
passing trend that would soon go out of fashion, the old square), but
I digress. When we told him about this he thought it was so great a
discovery that we ought to go down to the bar and have a drink about
it. Of course when I told him that I had just knocked up the program
in xyz80 machine code without even using an assembler he couldn't
believe it and we got so drunk that we woke up in Italy!

Perhaps the thing I enjoyed most though was inventing CAD/CAM software
for Leonardo. I just don't know how he would have coped with all those
drawings without it! But, the short spell on the laser control
software for Benvenuto and Micky A. was pretty good, though it was
touch and go because I was always getting into fights with Benny about
which axis we would call X and how many holes should be in a salt
cellar.

Then one day I was walking down the beach in Cali. And there was some
guy Don sat on a bench crying about some piece of paper he was trying
to get published. "I'll handle that one me old mate", said I... and
that's how I got into Pick!

Jim

POTY Candidate!

--
frosty

#34

Quote:

Tony Gravagno wrote:
Anyone remember the daisy wheel terminals? Any geeks here ever
actually code in APL using one?

Bill Cooke wrote:

Quote:

Sure, back when writing code was an art form.
But, about bandwidth, remember when Ultimate's compiler printed a '*'
for each line compiled while Pick's one printed one for every 10
lines, so it wouldn't be i/o bound over a telephone line?

ISTR Ian Sandler made the switch from one asterisk per line to one
per ten in Enhanced Pick, and announced it with the immortal line
"I found the throughput of the BASIC compiler was 9600 baud," or
words to that effect.

--
frosty

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Time in Pick

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