Powerhouse and my personallity disorder.

[Whittall, Conrad]

Sounds exactly like my first year at university in the North East of
England back in 1980...although we had a chance at 3 compiles per day
(morning, afternoon, and overnight).

Maybe we had it easy, as the college had a keypunch service. We could
write out our coding sheets and submit them before our first lecture at
9am and probably have our card deck back by lunchtime. That would just
give us enough time to check the deck and submit it for the afternoon
batch run (2pm cut-off), with the line printer output back by 4pm. If
there were any mistakes that needed to be corrected we could either use
the keypunch service again and hope that the new cards might be ready by
the following morning, or go and punch them ourselves and still be able
to catch the overnight run (8pm).

In the first year everyone was taught programming using Pascal, with the
'commercial' languages (COBOL and FORTRAN) and a few other esoteric ones
(LISP anyone?) being introduced in the second year.

And all of this was accomplished on a twin-processor Sperry Univac 1110,
with 256K of plated wire and 128K of core memory. All first year
undergraduates were 'confined' to the batch processing -- you got
interactive access for the second and subsequent years. But that system
used to support over 120 interactive users and multiple batch job
streams without even breaking into a sweat. (Which is more than can be
said for the network of Prime 750 mini computers that replaced it in my
final year!)

Boy do I feel old now...

Cheers,
Conrad

Best regards,
Conrad

Conrad Whittall
Senior Solutions Architect, Global Customer Services, Cognos
Incorporated
3755 Riverside Drive, Ottawa, Ontario, K1G 4K9, Canada

-----Original Message-----
From: powerh-l-admin@lists.sowder.com
[mailto:powerh-l-admin@lists.sowder.com] On Behalf Of David Morrison -
Corporate
Sent: Friday 22 April 2005 16:23
To: Deskin, Bob; powerh-l@lists.sowder.com
Subject: RE: Powerhouse and my personallity disorder.

Bob,

If you made fewer mistakes on punched cards, it's because you were
typing real slowly, because of the penalty if you goofed up.   I recall
that my favorite key was the DUP key, where you'd DUPlicate one card to
another by holding down that key while  the punches were copied from one
column to the next until you reached the column where you needed to fix
your error. I can't remember if you could insert a missing character and
then DUPlicate from there to the end, or not.

Hey, I also remember getting 2 compiles per day; submit the card deck in
the morning, get the results back about noon, fix my typoes and/or
mistakes, submit it again, and have the results by the next morning!

David Morrison
McBride Electric

------------------------- 
  
       This message may contain privileged and/or confidential information.  If you have received this e-mail in error or are not the intended recipient, you may not use, copy, disseminate or distribute it; do not open any attachments, delete it immediately from your system and notify the sender promptly by e-mail that you have done so.  Thank you.