OT.... but I need help

Ken Blake wrote:
I'm going back about 30-35 years, but I used to have a friend I worked
with who made a point of never wearing a watch. He used to frequently
ask me what time it was. It didn't take me very long to stop answering
his questions.


"Time to buy a watch."
--
Tciao for Now!

John.

On Mon, 05 Nov 2012 10:59:51 -0800, Gene Wirchenko
wrote:

On Mon, 05 Nov 2012 10:49:01 -0700, Ken Blake
wrote:

On Sun, 04 Nov 2012 18:06:26 -0800, Gene Wirchenko
wrote:

On Sun, 04 Nov 2012 18:50:21 +0000, John Williamson
wrote:

[snip]

For what it's worth, all my Casio watches of various ages consistently
gain about a second a day, and have done from new.

So mine is not the only one gaining time, eh? It gains about 1/2
second per day.

Unless you don't reset it until several weeks have gone by, and you
are talking about an average gain, how could you possibly know?

That is exactly what I do. I check it against my computer's
clock just after I have resynced it with an Internet time server.


As I suspected. But that very small error wouldn't bother me at all.

Ken

On Mon, 05 Nov 2012 13:39:05 -0600, Char Jackson
wrote:


There's a rather tasteless saying that comes to mind, about how you
can't swing a dead cat without fill in the blank,



Perhaps some people use the saying that way, but it was a cat, not a
dead cat, and doesn't refer to an animal, dead or alive. The cat in
that saying is a cat-o-nine-tails, a tool that was used for flogging
sailors in the British Navy.


I have to believe that standalone watches are a quickly dying,
or at least shrinking, industry.


Could be. I have no opinion on this because I've never noticed. But
I'll try to keep my eyes peeled for it in the future.

On Mon, 05 Nov 2012 20:27:00 +0000, John Williamson
wrote:

Ken Blake wrote:
I'm going back about 30-35 years, but I used to have a friend I worked
with who made a point of never wearing a watch. He used to frequently
ask me what time it was. It didn't take me very long to stop answering
his questions.


"Time to buy a watch."



I might be wrong, but I think he owned a watch; he just never wanted
to wear it, for whatever reason.

But I never said that, or anything else, in reply to his questions. I
just ignored him. He eventually got the message and stopped asking me.

Ken Blake wrote:
On Mon, 05 Nov 2012 10:18:15 +0000, Ed Cryer
wrote:

"Load" a program comes from when a program was held on punched cards,
and they had to be literally loaded into the card hopper.


Yes.


What happened in actuality was that an operator would carry them across
the room, trip over one of the wires, scatter the cards all over the
floor, pick them up and put them in the hopper.


LOL! Sometimes true.

But bear in mind that there were normally no wires on the floor.
Computer rooms normally had (presumably still have) raised floors with
all the cables, and air-conditioning, under the floor.



Next day the programmer would arrive at work and be told that his
program run had produced strange results!


But that's never true. It might depend on the machine, but in most
case as long as the first few cards remained at the beginning and the
last ones at the end, all would be well.

And if those few cards were not at the beginning and end, it would not
load at all. So the question was whether the program would run at all,
not whether it would run properly.

But if the order of the cards in a *source* program was screwed up,
yes, compiling the program, no running it, could have all sorts of
strange results.


Computers of a generation before us had even object programs held on
punched cards; and written in machine code too. If you just interchanged
two middle cards (say a shift-left-logical command and a subsequent XOR)
then the thing would run but produce wrong results.

Two more actualities in the cause of computing history.

1. One major machine kept dying. It took ages to find the cause.
Eventually they discovered that when a certain door was thrown fully
open it hit the emergency power-off button.

2. We were getting random strange run results for ages until we
discovered the cause. A batch of memory boards had been replaced by
incompetent staff who'd simply slid them out; but that dropped iron
filings all around the place, and these were moving around with the
current fluxes and shorting things out.

Ed

On Mon, 05 Nov 2012 13:52:25 -0600, Char Jackson
wrote:

On Mon, 05 Nov 2012 19:36:46 +0000, choro wrote:


Gentlemen, let us be precise...
55mi = 88.513920km
Now, you see how stupid the metric system is? ;-)

No, that doesn't illustrate how stupid the metric system is.
Logically, the metric system makes far more sense than what the US
uses now. How about we convert 90 KPH into MPH to illustrate how
stupid the other system is?


Yep! I completely agree.

And, as I said before, we should not be the odd man out, and should
measure things the way almost everyone else in the world does.

On Mon, 05 Nov 2012 14:40:38 -0700, Ken Blake
wrote:

On Mon, 05 Nov 2012 13:39:05 -0600, Char Jackson
wrote:

There's a rather tasteless saying that comes to mind, about how you
can't swing a dead cat without fill in the blank,

Perhaps some people use the saying that way, but it was a cat, not a
dead cat, and doesn't refer to an animal, dead or alive. The cat in
that saying is a cat-o-nine-tails, a tool that was used for flogging
sailors in the British Navy.

Thanks for that. I think I first heard the saying back in the 80's,
and for me since then it has always been as I described it. It sort of
guts the whole thing of its visual/mental impact if you take the dead
animal out of it.

--

Char Jackson

Ed Cryer wrote:
Ken Blake wrote:
On Mon, 05 Nov 2012 10:18:15 +0000, Ed Cryer
wrote:

"Load" a program comes from when a program was held on punched cards,
and they had to be literally loaded into the card hopper.


Yes.


What happened in actuality was that an operator would carry them across
the room, trip over one of the wires, scatter the cards all over the
floor, pick them up and put them in the hopper.


LOL! Sometimes true.

But bear in mind that there were normally no wires on the floor.
Computer rooms normally had (presumably still have) raised floors with
all the cables, and air-conditioning, under the floor.



Next day the programmer would arrive at work and be told that his
program run had produced strange results!


But that's never true. It might depend on the machine, but in most
case as long as the first few cards remained at the beginning and the
last ones at the end, all would be well.

And if those few cards were not at the beginning and end, it would not
load at all. So the question was whether the program would run at all,
not whether it would run properly.

But if the order of the cards in a *source* program was screwed up,
yes, compiling the program, no running it, could have all sorts of
strange results.


Computers of a generation before us had even object programs held on
punched cards; and written in machine code too. If you just interchanged
two middle cards (say a shift-left-logical command and a subsequent XOR)
then the thing would run but produce wrong results.

Two more actualities in the cause of computing history.

1. One major machine kept dying. It took ages to find the cause.
Eventually they discovered that when a certain door was thrown fully
open it hit the emergency power-off button.

2. We were getting random strange run results for ages until we
discovered the cause. A batch of memory boards had been replaced by
incompetent staff who'd simply slid them out; but that dropped iron
filings all around the place, and these were moving around with the
current fluxes and shorting things out.

Ed



Apropos which, I've just found this picture.
LOL.
http://tinyurl.com/brpjvee

Ed

Ken Blake wrote:
On Mon, 05 Nov 2012 20:27:00 +0000, John Williamson
wrote:

Ken Blake wrote:
I'm going back about 30-35 years, but I used to have a friend I worked
with who made a point of never wearing a watch. He used to frequently
ask me what time it was. It didn't take me very long to stop answering
his questions.

"Time to buy a watch."



I might be wrong, but I think he owned a watch; he just never wanted
to wear it, for whatever reason.

But I never said that, or anything else, in reply to his questions. I
just ignored him. He eventually got the message and stopped asking me.

Maybe this person was illiterate ?

Some illiterates are very good at hiding their situation,
substituting a friendly exterior as a means to pump
the people around them, for the information they can't
read for themselves.

If you'd kept an eye on him, he probably ended up
pestering someone else for the time.

If you'd caught him wearing a watch, you'd want to check
the time on it, to see if it was set properly. That would
be a giveaway, because a person who can't read the time,
can't set the watch either.

Paul

Ed Cryer wrote:


Apropos which, I've just found this picture.
LOL.
http://tinyurl.com/brpjvee

Ed

Now, that's a programmer.

And she did all that, before lunch.

That's about 15x more cards than I punched,
in my entire time with punch cards.

Paul

On Mon, 05 Nov 2012 16:18:04 -0600, Char Jackson
wrote:

On Mon, 05 Nov 2012 14:40:38 -0700, Ken Blake
wrote:

On Mon, 05 Nov 2012 13:39:05 -0600, Char Jackson
wrote:

There's a rather tasteless saying that comes to mind, about how you
can't swing a dead cat without fill in the blank,

Perhaps some people use the saying that way, but it was a cat, not a
dead cat, and doesn't refer to an animal, dead or alive. The cat in
that saying is a cat-o-nine-tails, a tool that was used for flogging
sailors in the British Navy.

Thanks for that. I think I first heard the saying back in the 80's,
and for me since then it has always been as I described it. It sort of
guts the whole thing of its visual/mental impact if you take the dead
animal out of it.


I understand, and sorry to have to take the impact away.

On Mon, 05 Nov 2012 17:27:59 -0500, Paul wrote:

Ken Blake wrote:
On Mon, 05 Nov 2012 20:27:00 +0000, John Williamson
wrote:

Ken Blake wrote:
I'm going back about 30-35 years, but I used to have a friend I worked
with who made a point of never wearing a watch. He used to frequently
ask me what time it was. It didn't take me very long to stop answering
his questions.

"Time to buy a watch."



I might be wrong, but I think he owned a watch; he just never wanted
to wear it, for whatever reason.

But I never said that, or anything else, in reply to his questions. I
just ignored him. He eventually got the message and stopped asking me.

Maybe this person was illiterate ?


No, not at all. He was very smart, well educated, and very good at his
job.

He was only weird in this one respect, as far as I know.



Some illiterates are very good at hiding their situation,
substituting a friendly exterior as a means to pump
the people around them, for the information they can't
read for themselves.


Maybe some, but not him.


If you'd kept an eye on him, he probably ended up
pestering someone else for the time.


I'm sure you're right.

On Mon, 05 Nov 2012 16:46:46 -0700, Ken Blake
wrote:

On Mon, 05 Nov 2012 16:18:04 -0600, Char Jackson
wrote:

On Mon, 05 Nov 2012 14:40:38 -0700, Ken Blake
wrote:

On Mon, 05 Nov 2012 13:39:05 -0600, Char Jackson
wrote:

There's a rather tasteless saying that comes to mind, about how you
can't swing a dead cat without fill in the blank,

Perhaps some people use the saying that way, but it was a cat, not a
dead cat, and doesn't refer to an animal, dead or alive. The cat in
that saying is a cat-o-nine-tails, a tool that was used for flogging
sailors in the British Navy.

Thanks for that. I think I first heard the saying back in the 80's,
and for me since then it has always been as I described it. It sort of
guts the whole thing of its visual/mental impact if you take the dead
animal out of it.


I understand, and sorry to have to take the impact away.

No apology necessary, I don't plan to use your version. ;-)

--

Char Jackson

On Mon, 05 Nov 2012 21:45:51 +0000, Ed Cryer
wrote:

Ken Blake wrote:
On Mon, 05 Nov 2012 10:18:15 +0000, Ed Cryer
wrote:

"Load" a program comes from when a program was held on punched cards,
and they had to be literally loaded into the card hopper.


Yes.


What happened in actuality was that an operator would carry them across
the room, trip over one of the wires, scatter the cards all over the
floor, pick them up and put them in the hopper.


LOL! Sometimes true.

But bear in mind that there were normally no wires on the floor.
Computer rooms normally had (presumably still have) raised floors with
all the cables, and air-conditioning, under the floor.



Next day the programmer would arrive at work and be told that his
program run had produced strange results!


But that's never true. It might depend on the machine, but in most
case as long as the first few cards remained at the beginning and the
last ones at the end, all would be well.

And if those few cards were not at the beginning and end, it would not
load at all. So the question was whether the program would run at all,
not whether it would run properly.

But if the order of the cards in a *source* program was screwed up,
yes, compiling the program, no running it, could have all sorts of
strange results.


Computers of a generation before us


Not a generation before me. I'm 75, and my computer experience goes
back to 1962.


had even object programs held on punched cards; and written in machine code too.


Yes and yes. That was my experience back in those days.


If you just interchanged
two middle cards (say a shift-left-logical command and a subsequent XOR)
then the thing would run but produce wrong results.


But that depends on what computer it was. It wasn't true with the 1401
I worked on from 1962 to 1966.



Two more actualities in the cause of computing history.

1. One major machine kept dying. It took ages to find the cause.
Eventually they discovered that when a certain door was thrown fully
open it hit the emergency power-off button.


LOL! That's a funny story, but one I can readily believe.


2. We were getting random strange run results for ages until we
discovered the cause. A batch of memory boards had been replaced by
incompetent staff who'd simply slid them out; but that dropped iron
filings all around the place, and these were moving around with the
current fluxes and shorting things out.


Another funny story.

I once had an IBM rep, one who had been bending over, straighten up
and hit his head against the emergency power off switch. It put us
down on two 370s for many hours.

On Mon, 05 Nov 2012 22:24:22 +0000, Ed Cryer
wrote:

Apropos which, I've just found this picture.
LOL.
http://tinyurl.com/brpjvee


LOL! I remember piles of cards like that very well. But they were
always cards we no longer needed and were getting rid of.