Technology Random Access Thoughts

[ZLoth]

So, some random thoughts about technology, and not just information technology...

If Publisher's Clearing House or another contest called you to say you are a winner, would you actually answer because of all the spam and "extended warranty" call?

Just some thoughts on technological progress.. My original TRS-80 Model III had 5¼-inch floppy drives, with each floppy disc had a capacity of 178,944 bytes available, and a 5 MB hard drive cost you an arm and a leg ($2,000-$2,500), and no, I didn't have one. My first computer with a hard drive was a 386-33 computer with a 5¼-inch floppy drive (max capacity 1.2 megabytes), a 3½-inch floppy drive (max capacity 1.44 megabytes), and a 105MB hard drive. Nowadays, because of the data captures and the high amount of details on the data files, it is not uncommon for a file to be generated that is megabytes in size. It's hard to purchase a USB thumb drive with a capacity less than 1GB unless you want to purchase 20-50 drives at once, plus the price difference between a 1 GB USB thumb drive and a slightly larger capacity is miniscule.

To that grade school/junior high/high school teacher who insisted that calculators be banned and that we had to figure it out manually, with the reasoning that you would never carry a calculator around with you... how many scientific calculator apps are available for download now? Of course, because of cheating and such, there are only certain calculators that are approved for major exams, and they better have no WiFi connectivity.

[GaryV]

If Publisher's Clearing House or another contest called you to say you are a winner,

You mean they don't actually show up on your front porch with a giant check? My dreams are shattered.

[Scott5114]

To that grade school/junior high/high school teacher who insisted that calculators be banned and that we had to figure it out manually, with the reasoning that you would never carry a calculator around with you... how many scientific calculator apps are available for download now? Of course, because of cheating and such, there are only certain calculators that are approved for major exams, and they better have no WiFi connectivity.

Not to mention that, in the real world, anyone that cares about your answers being right would absolutely prefer you to use a calculator rather than relying on your thirty-year-old memories of the times table. When I worked as a casino cashier they supplied one of those huge ten-key adding machines for each cashier window. We were encouraged to use it any time we had even a shadow of a doubt that we had the total right. Better to take a minute to punch up the total on the ten-key than to think you have it right and overpay someone.

[kalvado]

To that grade school/junior high/high school teacher who insisted that calculators be banned and that we had to figure it out manually, with the reasoning that you would never carry a calculator around with you... how many scientific calculator apps are available for download now? Of course, because of cheating and such, there are only certain calculators that are approved for major exams, and they better have no WiFi connectivity.

Not to mention that, in the real world, anyone that cares about your answers being right would absolutely prefer you to use a calculator rather than relying on your thirty-year-old memories of the times table. When I worked as a casino cashier they supplied one of those huge ten-key adding machines for each cashier window. We were encouraged to use it any time we had even a shadow of a doubt that we had the total right. Better to take a minute to punch up the total on the ten-key than to think you have it right and overpay someone.

There is - at least should be - some balance between trying to do everything in you head and staring blank at $20+$1 for a $5.80 charge.

[formulanone]

I still try to "make change" and work out things like multiplication/division tables in my head just to keep the dusty mathematician in my head happy. (Problem is, he obviously quit his job about midway through high school.)

If I need to look busy, I'll scribble out a math problem during things like expense reporting, or it's super useful for finding a good point to hang picture frames, re-arrange furniture, et cetera...when I need to sketch out the ideas and then the numbers just flow from there.

Technology-wise, there's still a lot of things I'm just stubborn or get forgetful. I sometimes forget the exact process for using our Fire stick and TV, because I might use it once every two months. Or recalling how to do things in Windows; I usually have to look up obscure features that I once used frequently 20 years ago.

And darn it, despite having loads of camera gear, I was mighty disappointed by my near-eclipse photos. I'll chalk that up to operator error, even though I've had my latest camera for over a year now. With so many more features and the camera over-thinking for you, sometimes there's moments you have to override several settings just to get exactly what you want out of it. Again, there's the humbling moment when I know others could probably get their desired results, because they practiced and learned for that moment and knew what to do, and I just winged it, and winged it some more. The best camera is the one in your hand, and the better camera is knowing to use it in that situation.

[jeffandnicole]

To that grade school/junior high/high school teacher who insisted that calculators be banned and that we had to figure it out manually, with the reasoning that you would never carry a calculator around with you... how many scientific calculator apps are available for download now? Of course, because of cheating and such, there are only certain calculators that are approved for major exams, and they better have no WiFi connectivity.

Not to mention that, in the real world, anyone that cares about your answers being right would absolutely prefer you to use a calculator rather than relying on your thirty-year-old memories of the times table. When I worked as a casino cashier they supplied one of those huge ten-key adding machines for each cashier window. We were encouraged to use it any time we had even a shadow of a doubt that we had the total right. Better to take a minute to punch up the total on the ten-key than to think you have it right and overpay someone.

There is - at least should be - some balance between trying to do everything in you head and staring blank at $20+$1 for a $5.80 charge.

From a customer's point of view: Come on, give me my change.

From an employee's point of view: Procedures are to enter the amount I was provided. We've been instructed there's scam artists that will purposely try to trick cashiers. If I get an additional dollar after the fact, do I try to calculate the change myself? Will I get written up? If I give back the wrong change and my drawer is short, will I get written up?

Not everyone is a mathematician. And the customer's employment isn't on the line if the employee screws up.

[SEWIGuy]

I am naturally good at math, but I use a calculator all of the time. I care more about accuracy than anything else, and its not any sort of badge of honor to do things in my head or on paper when I can get a 100% accurate answer in less time.

I also stopped writing in cursive as soon as they allowed me to and don't think it should be taught in schools at all.

[epzik8]

To that grade school/junior high/high school teacher who insisted that calculators be banned and that we had to figure it out manually,

This was "that one teacher" of mine in seventh grade.

[SEWIGuy]

To that grade school/junior high/high school teacher who insisted that calculators be banned and that we had to figure it out manually,

This was "that one teacher" of mine in seventh grade.

I don't know when you went to school, but I was never allowed to use a calculator in math class until I had a scientific one for trig in high school. This was the mid to late 80s.

[formulanone]

To that grade school/junior high/high school teacher who insisted that calculators be banned and that we had to figure it out manually,

This was "that one teacher" of mine in seventh grade.

I don't know when you went to school, but I was never allowed to use a calculator in math class until I had a scientific one for trig in high school. This was the mid to late 80s.

I wasn't allowed a calculator on tests in a classroom until my 12th-grade Physics teacher said it was okay. Mostly because it wasn't a required course (sciences were only required for the first three years of high school) and because he reminded us that the formulas and processes were the important things to remember.

[Scott5114]

To that grade school/junior high/high school teacher who insisted that calculators be banned and that we had to figure it out manually, with the reasoning that you would never carry a calculator around with you... how many scientific calculator apps are available for download now? Of course, because of cheating and such, there are only certain calculators that are approved for major exams, and they better have no WiFi connectivity.

Not to mention that, in the real world, anyone that cares about your answers being right would absolutely prefer you to use a calculator rather than relying on your thirty-year-old memories of the times table. When I worked as a casino cashier they supplied one of those huge ten-key adding machines for each cashier window. We were encouraged to use it any time we had even a shadow of a doubt that we had the total right. Better to take a minute to punch up the total on the ten-key than to think you have it right and overpay someone.

There is - at least should be - some balance between trying to do everything in you head and staring blank at $20+$1 for a $5.80 charge.

The balance is to just pay with the $20, keep the $1, and accept the consequences for your own unpreparedness instead of foisting them on some poor cashier.

[hbelkins]

The first Apple Macintosh computer I used in the newspaper business in 1987 was a Mac Plus. It had 1 MB of RAM and a 20 MB external hard drive. The souped-up computer we used for ad composition had 2 MB of RAM and a 40 MB external hard drive. We connected to our Apple LaserWriter printer with PhoneNet connectors. The hard drivers were SCSI and the mouse and keyboard used Apple Desktop Bus (ADB) connectors.

[MikeTheActuary]

I don't know when you went to school, but I was never allowed to use a calculator in math class until I had a scientific one for trig in high school. This was the mid to late 80s.

From my school experience in the mid-late 80's: calculators were forbidden in Algebra I and Geometry.  In Algebra II, we had a few tests/quizzes where we did a few questions without calculators ("just so you remember how to do math without them"), before we were allowed to break them out for the rest of the test.

I think my Trig class was one of the first ones where we didn't have to learn how to use trig tables; we were just expected to use scientific calculators.  (I was, of course, a smart-ass and brought a slide rule to my final exam.)

[GaryV]

Random access technology: We were thrilled when FORTRAN got indexed sequential files. You no longer had to read the entire file to find the record you wanted. This would have been sometime in the late 1980's if I recall.

[Dirt Roads]

Random access technology: We were thrilled when FORTRAN got indexed sequential files. You no longer had to read the entire file to find the record you wanted. This would have been sometime in the late 1980's if I recall.

I'm pretty sure that VAX Fortran had ISAM (indexed sequenced access method) back in the late 1970s.  By Late 1981, CDC was rolling out AAM (Record Manager advanced access methods) which improved its ISAM (VAX Cobol 5 was the first to use the new AAM, and the other languages could be retrofitted soon after).  But I remember the kluge to get IBM Fortran to interact with VSAM (virtual storage access method) using a JCL shell (on both OS360 and OS370).  Note that I "woren't gute at it", so I went on into the world of Control Systems.  But I hung onto Fortran programming until the end of my software days.

[Scott5114]

I mean, from what you hear from the Unix old timers, neither Fortran nor JCL were any good at being programming languages, so I'm not entirely sure you should feel bad about not being good at them:

Fortrash: /for·trash/, n.
Hackerism for the Fortran language, referring to its primitive design, gross and irregular syntax, limited control constructs, and slippery, exception-filled semantics.

JCL: /J·C·L/, n.
1. IBM's supremely rude Job Control Language. JCL is the script language used to control the execution of programs in IBM's batch systems. JCL has a very fascist syntax, and some versions will, for example, barf if two spaces appear where it expects one. Most programmers confronted with JCL simply copy a working file (or card deck), changing the file names. Someone who actually understands and generates unique JCL is regarded with the mixed respect one gives to someone who memorizes the phone book. It is reported that hackers at IBM itself sometimes sing "Who's the breeder of the crud that mangles you and me? I-B-M, J-C-L, M-o-u-s-e" to the tune of the Mickey Mouse Club theme to express their opinion of the beast.

2. A comparative for any very rude software that a hacker is expected to use. "That's as bad as JCL." As with COBOL, JCL is often used as an archetype of ugliness even by those who haven't experienced it. See also IBM, fear and loathing.

[GaryV]

VAX Fortran had ISAM (indexed sequenced access method) back in the late 1970s

Maybe we were just late adopters then. I didn't start at the company until late 1981, and I know there were a few years at least before we had ISAM.

[Dirt Roads]

I mean, from what you hear from the Unix old timers, neither Fortran nor JCL were any good at being programming languages, so I'm not entirely sure you should feel bad about not being good at them:

Actually, I meant that I wasn't good at getting IBM Fortran to interact with VSAM to keep oneself from having to load the entire database before finding a record at a known location. 

To be honest, I didn't have all that much programming experience in my career.  But I was proficient in the myriad of differences between FORTRAN3, FORTRAN4, FORTRAN77, IBM Fortran, VAX Fortran, MS Fortran, and Microsoft VisualFortran.  Including the fact that Microsoft couldn't get their function calls for matrix multiplication to work with imaginary numbers (which are indeed required in calculating the power flow when trains are in motion).  And yes, I still have my old JCL Programmers Card around here somewhere.

As for the UNIX folks, I can understand where most of them were coming from.  Folks that used JCL and Fortran were geared for engineering calculations.  Folks that used UNIX and the old C were wired for telecomms.  I had one friend (now deceased) who was superb at both (he worked for both AT&T and a rocket propulsion simulation consultancy).  I had several times that I needed to use UNIX, but even those were programming with Fortan77.  Looks like I just got stuck in a rut.

[noelbotevera]

Maybe I'm too darn young as a programmer, but I don't think I've ever run into a Fortran program. I wouldn't be surprised if some of the C libraries for mathematical calculations are imported Fortran code, though. I'm not sure what makes Fortran really good at math and only math -- apparently it has to do with almost everything being a vector, but the same is also true in C (except pointers which are integers, and structs which are their own mess; I think they're also pointers?). Never worked with non-Unix / non-Windows OSes; JCL strikes me as a walled garden with a lot of proprietary nonsense, since it seems only IBM uses that language.

I have taken an assembly programming class where programs can't be larger than 4 KB of RAM. I'm not very good at it, since trying to do tasks that are trivial in C (like sending data over a serial port) become an absolute slog in assembly. I never wrote programs larger than 700 bytes, but I can't imagine writing something like a game in assembly (but people have done it, and even in sizes smaller than 1 KB as an exercise).

Since I went to school in the Internet age, I've never been told "you'll never have a calculator in your pocket". Maybe in elementary school, but by middle school everyone had a smartphone. These days I rarely use my graphing calculator, since I'm usually doing algebra or looking up a Fourier transform, not calculations.

[Scott5114]

I wouldn't be surprised if some of the C libraries for mathematical calculations are imported Fortran code, though.

Assuming you're talking about the standard libraries, I would be pretty surprised if they were—Dennis Ritchie was such a brilliant programmer he would have had no reason to use existing Fortran code as a basis for anything in C, and if he somehow got stuck, well, he hung out with Ken Thompson. (The one time I read Thompson's writing I had to give up on it because it was clear he was on such completely different level than I that I felt like an ant trying to comprehend the Apollo space program.)

If you mean third-party vendors, maybe, but I would imagine those have long since been replaced in day-to-day use by open-source libraries written by dyed-in-the-wool C hackers who would feel queasy at the thought of even reading through a Fortran source file, never mind porting it.


Getting started with C for me was the most unusual thing, because once it started clicking, I could feel it rewriting the way my brain worked, for the better. It's such a simple language (when I got to the end of K&R, I was like...wait, that's it? that's the whole language?), and yet so incredibly powerful. It's a little tedious sometimes, but it's actually kind of fun to mess around with in a way that other languages aren't (although Perl can be a lot of fun too if you enjoy the sheer syntax lunacy it will let you get away with).

[vdeane]

(when I got to the end of K&R, I was like...wait, that's it? that's the whole language?)

When I was in college, that book was (only half) jokingly referred to as "the Bible".  I still have it after all these years, even though at this point the odds of me doing anything in C are slim to none.  The C language does have a certain elegance that many other languages lack.

[Scott5114]

I pull it out and read it cover to cover from time to time, even when I'm not planning on writing any C any time soon. So many modern languages (especially the two I write the most code in, Perl and PHP) lean so heavily on what C does, that it's helpful to refresh my knowledge of C even if I'm not writing in it.

[kurumi]

I remember long ago writing an in-house app using C and curses to track satellite telemetry. It was text-mode only, with a spreadsheet-like interface, and a super crude "best effort" chart feature using line drawing characters and the 80x25 screen. And: a macro language using recursive descent parsing. The tools were primitive, but the job was great fun.

[noelbotevera]

(when I got to the end of K&R, I was like...wait, that's it? that's the whole language?)

When I was in college, that book was (only half) jokingly referred to as "the Bible".  I still have it after all these years, even though at this point the odds of me doing anything in C are slim to none.  The C language does have a certain elegance that many other languages lack.

I pull it out and read it cover to cover from time to time, even when I'm not planning on writing any C any time soon. So many modern languages (especially the two I write the most code in, Perl and PHP) lean so heavily on what C does, that it's helpful to refresh my knowledge of C even if I'm not writing in it.

Hey, I actually printed out this book to self study! I'm amazed at how it also teaches you to be a better programmer (like avoiding magic numbers -- replace fixed constants with symbols, so it's easier to change these constants later) while teaching you the language. Obviously some of it is outdated, namely anything involving floats being simplified with C99.

I think one of the neatest tricks with (Unix like) C is how basic system calls like read(), write(), open(), and close() can be used for both files and network sockets. What sort of witchcraft is being performed to make a network socket behave like a file? Makes file transfer really freaking easy in C.

[Scott5114]

What sort of witchcraft is being performed to make a network socket behave like a file? Makes file transfer really freaking easy in C.

That's how Unix works—everything is a file, even devices. (Look in your /dev directory and there they all are.) You send data to a device by writing to the file that corresponds to the device. This means you can do some kind of amazing stuff very simply. You can make a white noise generator by reading /dev/random and writing it to the speakers, for instance.

Since C is native to Unix, it just kept the same metaphor.