30-up: You know what? Those really weren't the days It's 30 years since .EXE Magazine carried the first Stob column; this is its pearl Perl anniversary. Rereading article #1, a spoof self-tester in the Cosmo style, I was struck by how distant the world it invoked seemed. For example: Your program requires a disk to have been put in the floppy drive, but it hasn't. What happens …
she is way more coherent than normal
That she speaketh of things you cannot follow does not always imply *she* is the incoherent one :).
Ah, Turbo Pascal. I used to save money on software by being a beta tester for Borland and although I never amounted to much as a programmer (at least in my eyes) I have done a lot of weird things with both Turbo Pascal and Paradox.
On one occasion I replaced two man weeks of typing with a 15 minute batchfile that (a) ran a report on the central server to generate a report (the thing that was normally typed in by 2 people over a week), (b) grabbed the resulting file with Kermit (that the sysadmin agreed to install), (c) stripped the headers and cleaned it up with some Turbo Pascal code, (d) ran a Paradox script to import the result, chew on it some and then spit out the result those typists were after. But accurate (my motivation was not the speed - the inaccuracies always messed up my work).
As I wasn't allowed to do this (programming was seen as a magic process by management, not to be performed by mere unauthorised mortals lurking in outposts and warehouses on the dangly end of a serial MUX) I had to do it on the sly, and even after I got it to work it was sort of not acknowledged because that would piss off the programming gods at HQ.
But boy did it get a workout :).
Come to think of it, it was in those days the first inkjet arrived, and in those hallowed days you could still give something a "BJ xxx" (BJ 130) designator without people sniggering in the back (yes, I heard you) as Canon called it a "bubblejet" which was mercifully silent compared to the Start dot matrix I just overheated by accidentally making it print a page of solid black (don't ask, but it failed very spectacularly :) ). Of course, I came up with the idea of using the thing as a barcode label printer which was completely out of spec for the poor thing, but it just worked and as a "proper" thermal transfer printer would have set us back for a factor more, we didn't care - we'd get a new one if it broke (which, to Canon's credit, it never did).
In those days the amount of buyers was still low enough for Canon to spot that we where blowing through ink at about 4x the expected rate ('coz we waz printing a lotta black, man) so we got a call, "WTF were we doing, is the printer bust?". When we told Canon we were torturing the poor thing with barcodes, we were told it would not stand up to that and break in a month. Telling them we'd been doing it for half a year now with no problems earned us a personal visit of the EMEA head - which turned out to be a former Borland rep. Small world - but you could get sh*t done.
As for BBS et al - does anyone recall DoubleDOS? :)
I have a AUTOCAD 11 on 5 1/2 floppy with the drive for 386, complete with two drawing pads and the templates for drawing schematics and text. No USB; sorry. Probably have the xternal power supplies for something or other. I keep it under my workbench with my Data General One laptop and my Sears 1922 Neutrodyne.
Turbo Pascal, first programming environ I used on PCs, I do remember it as being quite usable after previously being all COBOL on various mini's.
WIMP & GEM, I though that's a very pretty way of kicking off the full screen DOS programs compared to 'menu.bat' everyone used but the mouse cost (about £30 then) was just plain silly, mind you an ordinary Cherry keyboard was touching £100. queue gasps from the youngsters :)
queue gasps from the youngsters
cue - signal or indicator
queue - a row of people waiting for something.
Sigh
PS - happy anniversary, Ms Stob - brilliantly witty for thirty years. Just to mention two, your code walkthrough article and Lord Peter Wimsey skit will live long in my memory.
That DTP package would be Ami Pro, by Lotus. I used it a lot as a teenager; it was pretty good. Relatively nippy even on a ghastly old 286. GEM wasn't much more than a single-tasking shell and GUI toolkit, but it was clean and got out of the way and suited Ami Pro fine. (And was a huge step above the trainwreck which was native DOS GUI applications.)
Strangely I can barely find a mention of the GEM version on the interwebs. There are plenty of mentions of the forgettable Windows version which came out later, but nothing about the GEM version. I wonder if I can find a copy? I bet it'd run really well on a modern PC...
WIMP and GEM?
Am I the only one brought up on character terminals and DOS PCs to have been given an early MAC and spent an hour looking for the command prompt, and on being told there wasn't one spending another few hours wondering "but how do you make it do anything useful?"?
Re Apple Macs and command lines: yes, that was precisely my experience. The first thing I looked for was the menu option to exit the GUI.
I'm particularly proud that after diligent searching, I *did* actually manage to find the CLI, by locating the interrupt key on the side of the machine; this dropped me into MacsBug, which was completely incomprehensible...
OMG--am I that old? (I wont mention my exposure on the IBM 360 Mark 1965, fresh out of the box; I have a Certificate of Competence on the IBM 026 Duplicating Keypunch) I remember the Eternal Summer when the internet went to hell...and even the comp.women debate. At the time I had a DEC terminal that I could connect to the internet; there was a local ISP that I could connect to for free after 5 PM. During the day Ed Featherstone would extract and email usenet postings. I later did field circus on Nat. Weather Service weathermap receivers controlled by tone controls over the phone lines
As a now almost-oldie myself, the thing that always most horrifies me about these reminders of the past is that apparently there actually really were some misguided people who were somehow “trying” to do stuff with those primitive DOS beige boxes, while the rest of us were *really* getting things done (in glorious musical Technicolor) with our Amigas, Atari STs, or even (if you had very wealthy parents) Apple Macs…
I am, unfortunately, old enough that my first thought was of a certain role-playing game with funny dice
Nowt wrong with ADnD. Apart from the riduculous racially-limited class system. And the many inconsistencies. And the overt sexism..
(But hey - I was a student then and spent far more time playing ADnD and CoC than actually studying..)
There is another sort of DnD?
I remember one DM getting fed up with one dwarf always going into the brothel, he ended up "slipping in" an evil witch that hexed him, it made night time travel on the road easy, but being stealthy when your nether regions glow through your leather trousers is not easy.
drag/drop certainty: right-click 'copy' on source. go to other explorer/caja/konqueror/whatever window. right-click 'paste'. Then, when it's complete, optionally delete source with another right-click maneuver
takes more time, but you're unlikely to drop it on the wrong thing that way
I'd like to thank Ms Stob for making me realize that I've been avoiding drag and drop for three decades. Didn't like it in 1988 and don't like it now. I have no idea why.
And I'd also like to thank her for letting me know that I'm not the only one who finds git to be baffling. Not that I think get is bad or evil. I just don't grok it. Fortuitously RCS is sufficient for my needs.
The last time I encountered ligatures in an editor was using Eclipse in about 2012. I don't know if it was something weird about my setup, but it insisted on rendering "fi" as "fi" (Unicode character 'LATIN SMALL LIGATURE FI' (U+FB01)), semi-randomly ruining the monospaced character alignment.
Presumably someone somewhere made a deliberate choice to use ligatures wherever possible, but this one is a step too far in my not-so-humble opinion!
That ligature font looked really nice at first. Then I saw their code samples and I realised just how awful an idea it was. I'd quite like to be able to *see* === not have to guess it from it's relative width...
I have to admit that I've been tempted by ligatures on the web. Mainly because I quite like the idea of using the word "menu" but have it ligature to the hamburger icon. Strikes me as a nice accessibility wossit.
Actually, we old timers punched cards. ... Fade to scene of a dozen gaijin and Japanese programmers frantically moving hundreds of boxes of punched cards from computer room floor to tables as typhoon driven floodwaters slowly infiltrate computer center. Yes, that happened.
Punch cards? Luxury. We toggled switches and read Blinkenlights ... and we liked it!
(This reply being typed on an amber-on-black IBM 3151 + Model M keyboard, which is attached to my laptop's docking station via serial port. Text-only logins are kinda handy when doing development work and the GUI goes titsup. Try it, you might like it.)
No email, hard drive space, cramming everything onto floppies to be sent in the post to the customer with line-by-line instructions on how to unzip (zip having to be included on the disc of course). (2018 FTP and let recipient test when their bit of the world wakes up.)
Then the curse of the mouse. Stealing my desk and forcing me to have another cable which probably meant a special adaptor to connect to the PC. (2018 Wireless trackball)
'Paper white' screens, all CRT cream of course, with fuzzy zones limiting tiny text. (2018 3 large solid state screens. Still deep dark blue background for coding as that's easier on the eyes at night.)
"By 1988, email was normal enough to be on business cards."
That very much depends upon the environment. I recall in the 1992ish era a recruiter, seeing my e-mail address on my resume, asking if it was actually useful (at the time, not much; all my contacts came via phone. Land line, of course).
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