Wayne.B wrote in
:

On Sat, 27 Sep 2008 00:59:42 +0000, Larry wrote:

Oh, my....Pets cost more than Commode Door 64....

Whenever I call Knology about an outage, I ask them if they minded
going back into the garage and plugging the Commodore 64 back into the
wall so we can have internet in Charleston, again....(c;

I had a 64 and the Vic-20 before that. Who would believe in this day
and age that we actually stored data and programs on audio cassette
tape at one time.



I have Z80 software on paper tape for your teletype machine....(c;

it's in hexidecimal...all very modern.

Marty wrote in
news
Audio tape is for wimps, I used to store them on punched paper tape,
ASR-33 teletype with integral tape reader and punch!


Ahhh....the sounds of reperf in the mawnin'!

Jere Lull wrote in news:2008092701031650073-
jerelull@maccom:

This thread is SO off-topic, but I'm laughing too much to say "stop".



No it's not. There are many Windows 98 machines running on boats....

"Capt. JG" wrote in
easolutions:

Hey, my first modem was a 300 to 1200 baud... $475 new. It was so
cheap I bought three of them! LOL



And, just like the rest of us, you sat for HOURS thrilling to the stuff you
were downloading from some obscure hacker's BBS....just because YOU would
have something noone ELSE had when it was done!

Our secret BBS was called "Summerville 80" in Summerville, SC. There were
two BBSs in one house, the public one everyone knew about and another, more
obscure, unlisted, unpublished 56K BBS for the chosen few who supported it
and stole the finest stuff from the finest places for all to play......

I can still remember that phone number....(c;

Larry wrote:



I have Z80 software on paper tape for your teletype machine....(c;

it's in hexidecimal...all very modern.

I still have a binful of parts to repair tape readers, Chalco IIRC.

Used to have a bunch of stuff that the Canadian Navy flew in Arguses,
they were really modern, used metalized mylar tape. Kind of pretty for
Christmas decoration in the shop, silver on one side and shiny blue on
the other. I shudder to think how many millions of dollars worth of
code we had strung on the ceiling.

Cheers
Marty

On Sat, 27 Sep 2008 15:13:07 +0000, Larry wrote:

No it's not. There are many Windows 98 machines running on boats....

They should be upgraded to Win2K immediately. It's much more stable.
No joke - A lot of the Windows bad rep is from the Win95 and Win98
era.

"Larry" wrote in message
...
"Capt. JG" wrote in
easolutions:

Hey, my first modem was a 300 to 1200 baud... $475 new. It was so
cheap I bought three of them! LOL



And, just like the rest of us, you sat for HOURS thrilling to the stuff
you
were downloading from some obscure hacker's BBS....just because YOU would
have something noone ELSE had when it was done!

Our secret BBS was called "Summerville 80" in Summerville, SC. There were
two BBSs in one house, the public one everyone knew about and another,
more
obscure, unlisted, unpublished 56K BBS for the chosen few who supported it
and stole the finest stuff from the finest places for all to play......

I can still remember that phone number....(c;



Well, actually, I had a business going and we needed the outside world. LOL

--
"j" ganz @@
www.sailnow.com

"Vic Smith" wrote in message
...
On Sat, 27 Sep 2008 00:50:43 +0000, Larry wrote:


I wrote the system using Dbase III, but as CODE, not the automated Dbase
bugware it wrote itself. The code was long because they kept adding to
my tasking. The system, at 4.77 Mhz, slowed because of Dbase's
interpreter, of course.

Then, Clipper came out with this snazzy Dbase III COMPILER that
assembled the libraries and machine code of your system into a huge .exe
file that, by those standards, ran like greased lightning. My Clipper
serial number is 1700...(c; Navy refused to buy it and we got caught
trying to run around the end, so I paid $495 out of my pocket for it.

NOTE: Since the friend I mention below has a Wauquiez 38' Hood Mark
II and sometimes cruises, I deem this post not too far off topic.

There were a lot of apps designed for small business and home use that
couldn't make the transition to big time data flows.
Dbase was pretty slick as far as it went. I knew a guy still doing
Clipper work for small businesses in the mid-90's.
I wrote an employee "database" interactive app for use by one of the
consulting firms I worked for in Lotus spreadsheet macros back in the
'80's. Screen flashing all over the place since it was interpretive,
but it worked and management used it for years.
MicroFocus came out with a beautiful compiling COBOL package for the
PC in 1985, supporting an ISAM-like file structure and emulating
interactive CICS, but it cost about 4 grand for the complete package,
so it was easier to spend a few hundred for Dbase, Lotus, etc, and
hack away.
I recall MicroFocus was an English firm.
I was contracting for a very large IBM shop in Chicago when the
MicroFocus package came out. A friend - who is a sometime cruiser -
consulting at the same shop asked the manager of Tech Support to get a
copy from MicroFocus. MicroFocus had the tech support guy swear up
and down to keep it closely guarded for the evaluation.
Within an hour of it arriving about 7 of us had full copies, and we
were busy lugging InstaPrint copies of the manuals from the copy shop
across the street. So much for promises. Think it was about $50
apiece for copying the manuals.
My friend told me he did an app for an accountant friend of his, and I
used mine to write a complex mult-module/file thoroughbred
handicapping app, employing many variables that had to be keyed in
daily. It was structured, slick, and *almost* turning a profit
running the projection module when Arlington Park burned down and I
gave it up. I found futures trading a better way to gamble.
I really don't think the MicroFocus package found its niche in the
market, and believe it was later absorbed by MS. But it was certainly
better for developing small business apps than the competition.
Just too expensive, and you needed to know COBOL.
At that time everybody thought they could buy software off the shelf
to run their business. Maybe they really can now!

--Vic


I have a friend who support COBOL. Makes a nice living doing it too.

--
"j" ganz @@
www.sailnow.com

On 2008-09-27 08:54:40 -0400, Vic Smith said:

At that time everybody thought they could buy software off the shelf to
run their business. Maybe they really can now!

The salespeople would like you to believe that, but no business can use
off-the-shelf software without programmer support, even if the
programmers are the users of the software.

Since the 60s, at least, the second, third, fourth generation
programming languages have promised the elimination of programmers. The
reality has been opposite as users demand more and more.

Everyone wants that little bit more that only a programmer can deliver.

--
Jere Lull
Xan-à-Deux -- Tanzer 28 #4 out of Tolchester, MD
Xan's pages: http://web.mac.com/jerelull/iWeb/Xan/
Our BVI trips & tips: http://homepage.mac.com/jerelull/BVI/

On Sat, 27 Sep 2008 21:04:01 GMT, Jere Lull wrote:

Everyone wants that little bit more that only a programmer can deliver.

Are you saying I should update my ten year old version of Agent?

Casady