On Fri, 27 Sep 2024 12:02:24 +0100, Andy Walker wrote:

> The Difference Engine was a completely different project.

I know. Only, for some reason, the cartoonist in question preferred that
name to “Analytical Engine” ...

> Babbage is remembered today for little more than these projects,
> but he did much more than that.

Also, he hated street musicians. That was his idea of “crime”, according
to Ms Padua. While for Lovelace, her weakness (and nemesis) was poetry ...

On Fri, 27 Sep 2024 17:43:31 GMT, Charlie Gibbs wrote:

> Yes, I got into them early - and found it was a short easy step to CSV,
> so now my stuff can be read by the people in spreadsheet land. I have,
> however, had to put a fair amount of effort into what I call
> "Excel-proofing" my data, since our favourite Redmond software company
> loves meddling with it.

I found, years ago, that outputting SYLK format was a fairly robust
way of generating data for use by the spreadsheet folks. But that
doesn’t seem to be well-known these days.

Trying to “Excel-proof” data is generally regarded as a futile
exercise. The logical answer would be “use a better tool than Excel”,
but there seems to be a Gresham’s Law of IT interoperability, where
the mediocre, Microsoft-based product pushes out the higher-quality
alternatives ...

<https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1008984>

On Fri, 27 Sep 2024 20:38:38 GMT, Charlie Gibbs wrote:

> I was once called in to optimize a CPU-bound COBOL program.
> The genius who wrote it declared all subscripts as COMP-3.
> Changing them to COMP-4 knocked 30% off the execution time.

Did you just change

DEFINE TYPE COMP AS COMP-3

to

DEFINE TYPE COMP as COMP-4

and that would take effect everywhere that COMP was used?

Oh, wait, COBOL didn’t have typedefs ...

On 9/27/24 7:02 AM, Andy Walker wrote:
> On 27/09/2024 07:52, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
>> [...] Imagine
>> that Charles Babbage hadn’t completely failed at building his Analytical
>> Engine. (Only it was called the “Difference Engine”, for some
>> inexplicable
>> reason.)
>
>     The Difference Engine was a completely different project.  It was
> called the Difference Engine because it was meant to calculate
> differences*,
> which were the principal tools in numerical mathematics for the calculation
> of values of functions [sine, cosine, sqrt, log, ...].  In the days before
> computers, tables of such values were an essential part of the engineer's
> [or physicist's or statistician's] toolkit and was what mathematicians
> often
> spent their entire careers providing and checking.  It was tedious work, so
> was ripe for automation.
>
>     Babbage is remembered today for little more than these projects, but
> he did much more than that.  His Wiki article is worth reading, if only to
> learn the breadth of his interests and contributions.

Babbage really was a gifted engineer and maths guy,
he had enough rep to get the govt to front him rather
a lot of money to build the difference engine.

Apparently costs-analysis was NOT one of his best
skills alas. The machine is devilishly complicated
and was at the cutting edge of mechanical techniques
and precision at that time.

I think some MIT people finally *built* one, or a
substantial part of one. I've seen a vid, all the
brass clockwork is hypnotic to watch.

I'd say his greatest accomplishment was establishing
once and for all that any math/logic can be done by
machine, no 'magic' in a human brain required. The
mid 1800s were when they could finally whisk away
all the pixies and 'principles of' and 'essences'
and made 'natural philosophy' into real science.

Lada Ada does indeed have a rep for being a pain
in the ass and a relentless egotist/self-promoter.
However she DID immediately grasp the concepts
behind the Analytical Engine (even wrote a big
promo for it - there's a French text on the net)
and DID see it's more esoteric uses whilst Babbage
was mostly obsessed with doing boring math algos.

Ah, a translation she did of that 'promo' for
British consumption :

https://old.maa.org/press/periodicals/convergence/mathematical-treasure-ada-lovelaces-notes-on-the-analytic-engine

Alas the AE was even more complex than the DE plus
Babbage kept revising and revising the gearworks
and thus never arrived at what you'd even call a
"final design", much less an actual device. The
reasoning of what it NEEDED to do was perfectly
sound however - as important as an actual product.
It WAS (or would have been) a "general-purpose
computer" ... a i8008 in shiny brass.

Poor bastard was born about 50 years too soon - if
he'd ever seen a triode tube ...

There WAS some Russian ex-pat building digital logic
circuits with trides/'valves' in the 1910s as I
recall - the U *THREW MOST OF IT AWAY* after he retired,
only a few assemblies survived (looked like 8 or 10
bit adders).

On 9/27/24 1:43 PM, Charlie Gibbs wrote:
> On 2024-09-27, 186282@ud0s4.net <186283@ud0s4.net> wrote:
>
>> I always liked ascii-delimited multi-value records.
>> Hey, you can actually READ them. They are also VERY
>> easy and cheap for microcontrollers and such to
>> create on the fly.
>
> Yes, I got into them early - and found it was a short easy
> step to CSV, so now my stuff can be read by the people in
> spreadsheet land. I have, however, had to put a fair amount
> of effort into what I call "Excel-proofing" my data, since
> our favourite Redmond software company loves meddling with it.
> ISO 8601 does a good job of sidestepping Excel's obsession
> with turning dates into month/day/year format, for instance.

I ran into ascii-delimited MV records when I did
some things with the PICK system long back. These
were largely 'text' records ... 10000 was "10000",
not any binary rep. As such, the 'high' ascii vals
were used as record/field/subfield/subsubfield
delimiters (this was before unicode). On old PCs
you could directly view the delims - those funky
graphics-like characters so handy for making
text/terminal forms.

However I'd been doing a number of microcontroller-
based dataloggers and found that building up
ascii-delimited was really THE easiest way of
storing lots of sensor values. You just keep
tacking-stuff onto the end of the string and
save it when done. No more exotic structure or
logic required.

<Temp1><subfield-mark><Temp2><field-mark><Humid1>
<subfield-mark><Humid2><subfield-mark><Humid3>
<field-mark>" etc until you've done all the
various kinds of sensors and then you stick a
<record-mark> at the end. Human-readable.
Revelation DB system used ascii-255 as the record
mark, 254 as the field marks and worked backwards
from there, thus allowing about 127 levels of
sub-sub values though nobody EVER used THAT many.

Machine-reading is straight-up. Some kinds of
EDITING can get peculiar however because you
want some kind of 'intent' defined - 'data
dictionaries' are a common approach. DBs
generally use hashing to facilitate getting
to a given record quickly.

ANYWAY, those became my go-to kind of record
keeping for many projects and I wrote little
related functions in a number of langs.

I've noted that some people think that because
their high-level lang has a function for dealing
with strings and such means it's better/faster
but the TRUTH is that most langs are writ in 'C'
and those functions are just handy, disguised,
'C'. Just because you don't SEE 'strtok()' does
not mean it isn't ACTUALLY used.

Final note, FORTRAN is *still* good for most
uses. It's fairly clear, un-fancy, and well-tuned
and people added enough to it over the years so
there's hardly any task you can't do with it.
Still didn't find a native FORTRAN compiler for
modern Linux though ... I suspect when Intel
nixxed 8-bit code it broke most of them. Such
a pity ... and 8-bits WERE enough for a lot
of little things and SO nicely compact.

On Fri, 27 Sep 2024 23:30:46 -0000 (UTC), Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:

> Back in the days when BASIC was considered “advanced” ...

I don't think Beginners' All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code was ever
considered 'advanced'.

“It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that
have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are
mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.”
― Edsger Dijkstra

https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/1013817.Edsger_W_Dijkstra

He thought highly of COBOL too.

“The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be
regarded as a criminal offense.”

We had a RS6000 machine named 'djikstra' (sic). It was probably named by
the director of engineering. His personal Linux box was 'warfrat'. You
learn about regular expressions when search code created by a person who
couldn't spell for sour owl shit.

On 28 Sep 2024 02:20:45 GMT, rbowman wrote:

> On Fri, 27 Sep 2024 23:30:46 -0000 (UTC), Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
>
>> Back in the days when BASIC was considered “advanced” ...
>
> I don't think Beginners' All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code was ever
> considered 'advanced'.

It had dynamic strings, which most other languages of the time did not
(unless you went to Lisp, which was considered Serious CompSci Magic).

> “It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that
> have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are
> mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.”
> ― Edsger Dijkstra

Looking back, a lot of his writings just seem like trolling.

On 9/24/24 8:52 PM, Charlie Gibbs wrote:
> On 2024-09-24, rbowman <bowman@montana.com> wrote:
>
>> On Tue, 24 Sep 2024 18:24:05 GMT, Charlie Gibbs wrote:
>>
>>> Once I got network programming figured out, I wrote my own library of
>>> functions that set everything up the way I want it (including SSH and
>>> TLS). Sure, you have to watch your step sometimes, but it's not quite
>>> as bad as people make it out to be.
>>
>> I saw no reason to reinvent the OpenSSL wheel particularly if you need
>> FIPS compliance.
>
> My libraries call OpenSSL, but let me establish a connection
> (with or without TLS) with a single call.

I was fooling with TCP/UDP client-server stuff and
at SOME point realized I was re-inventing FTP :-)

On Wed, 25 Sep 2024 00:52:17 GMT, Charlie Gibbs wrote:

> My libraries call OpenSSL, but let me establish a connection (with or
> without TLS) with a single call.

I suppose you can do anything with a single call, if you pack enough
arguments into it ...

On 28/09/2024 03:20, rbowman wrote:
> On Fri, 27 Sep 2024 23:30:46 -0000 (UTC), Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
>
>> Back in the days when BASIC was considered “advanced” ...
>
> I don't think Beginners' All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code was ever
> considered 'advanced'.
>
> “It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that
> have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are
> mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.”
> ― Edsger Dijkstra
>
> https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/1013817.Edsger_W_Dijkstra
>
> He thought highly of COBOL too.
>
> “The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be
> regarded as a criminal offense.”
>
> We had a RS6000 machine named 'djikstra' (sic). It was probably named by
> the director of engineering. His personal Linux box was 'warfrat'. You
> learn about regular expressions when search code created by a person who
> couldn't spell for sour owl shit.

Personally I thought Djikstra was an opinionated asshole. Once Von
Neumann had done his stuff, there was no science left in computing to be
found, but people had still gone around trying to design theoretically
better shit, which (like socialism) always fails in practice.

A bad programmer will wrote shit code in any language.

--
"In our post-modern world, climate science is not powerful because it is
true: it is true because it is powerful."

Lucas Bergkamp

On 9/27/24 4:38 PM, Charlie Gibbs wrote:
> On 2024-09-27, geodandw <geodandw@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> On 9/27/24 13:43, Charlie Gibbs wrote:
>>
>>> On 2024-09-27, geodandw <geodandw@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Cobol was also very portable.
>>>
>>> As long as your destination compiler supports COMP-3. :-)
>>
>> Or your source computer didn't have COMP-3, or if you didn't use it.
>
> I was once called in to optimize a CPU-bound COBOL program.
> The genius who wrote it declared all subscripts as COMP-3.
> Changing them to COMP-4 knocked 30% off the execution time.

Did COBOL even HAVE real "types" ???

It was not really a "sophisticated" language.
It was MEANT mostly for biz/commercial apps,
esp financial and scheduling. It was GOOD at
that - except for being TOO ugly/confusing in
the chase to be "simple/self-documenting".

I don't hate COBOL - it HAD/HAS its place.
However the real-world implementation could
never live-up to "The Vision".

COBOL could/can be "improved" - made more
efficient. But NOBODY is gonna DO that
these days. As such COBOL kinda becomes
like 'Latin' - an unchanging 'dead' lang.
This MAY be a good thing.

On Sat, 28 Sep 2024 07:42:32 +0100, The Natural Philosopher wrote:

> Once Von Neumann had done his stuff, there was no science left in
> computing to be found ...

You forgot Claude Shannon’s founding of information theory.
This led to the invention of computer networking, and look at the massive
effect that has had on our entire society.

Tony Hoare invented the switch/case statement. And went on to create the
CSP paradigm, which was the basis for the Transputer hardware and the
Occam language it ran.

Digital signal processing, including the Fast Fourier Transform, is the
reason why we don’t listen to music on analog media like vinyl any more,
and why even movies and TV have gone digital.

And don’t forget the revolution in encryption research in the 1970s (RSA,
Diffie-Hellman etc), which turned number theory from “pure maths” to
“applied maths”, and rendered everything known about encryption in the
entirety of human history prior to that point fit only for a museum.

On 28/09/2024 08:18, 186282@ud0s4.net wrote:
> On 9/27/24 4:38 PM, Charlie Gibbs wrote:
>> On 2024-09-27, geodandw <geodandw@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> On 9/27/24 13:43, Charlie Gibbs wrote:
>>>
>>>> On 2024-09-27, geodandw <geodandw@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> Cobol was also very portable.
>>>>
>>>> As long as your destination compiler supports COMP-3.  :-)
>>>
>>> Or your source computer didn't have COMP-3, or if you didn't use it.
>>
>> I was once called in to optimize a CPU-bound COBOL program.
>> The genius who wrote it declared all subscripts as COMP-3.
>> Changing them to COMP-4 knocked 30% off the execution time.
>
>   Did COBOL even HAVE real "types" ???
>
>   It was not really a "sophisticated" language.
>   It was MEANT mostly for biz/commercial apps,
>   esp financial and scheduling. It was GOOD at
>   that - except for being TOO ugly/confusing in
>   the chase to be "simple/self-documenting".
>
>   I don't hate COBOL - it HAD/HAS its place.
>   However the real-world implementation could
>   never live-up to "The Vision".
>
>   COBOL could/can be "improved" - made more
>   efficient. But NOBODY is gonna DO that
>   these days. As such COBOL kinda becomes
>   like 'Latin' - an unchanging 'dead' lang.
>   This MAY be a good thing.
>
COBOL was massively good at what it did, and what it still does.

Batch processing *enormous* quantities of data with a few small routines.

It was designed for and on machines with very small memories, initially
core store, but very large data sets stored on hard drives or tapes, and
is massively efficient at utilising that. 64k of RAM and a z80 was a
luxury for COBOL

Its ideas about data organisation led to the relational database. And
thence SQL and friends

A subject about which most people here know very little.

Analysing businesses and writing code to streamline their operations is
a different art to network programming. *All* the hard work is in the
analysis and initial data definitions and structures.

Back in the day the lowliest part of that process was the 'coder' who
simply turned the specs into clean COBOL ....:-)

--
The theory of Communism may be summed up in one sentence: Abolish all
private property.

Karl Marx

On Sat, 28 Sep 2024 09:12:02 +0100, The Natural Philosopher wrote:

> COBOL was massively good at what it did, and what it still does.

Too short-sighted in its design: in its focus on what passed for
“business” needs in the early 1960s, it struggled to keep up with the
growing popularity of relational databases in the 1970s and 1980s. To
construct SQL queries, you really needed good dynamic string handling, and
COBOL explicitly eschewed all that. So SQL handling was always some kind
of bag on the side, rather than properly integrated into the language.

On Fri, 27 Sep 2024 20:54:08 -0400, 186282@ud0s4.net wrote:

> On 9/27/24 7:02 AM, Andy Walker wrote:
>> On 27/09/2024 07:52, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
>>> [...] Imagine that Charles Babbage hadn’t completely failed at
>>> building his Analytical Engine. (Only it was called the “Difference
>>> Engine”, for some inexplicable reason.)
>>
>>     The Difference Engine was a completely different project.  It
>>     was
>> called the Difference Engine because it was meant to calculate
>> differences*,
>> which were the principal tools in numerical mathematics for the
>> calculation of values of functions [sine, cosine, sqrt, log, ...].  In
>> the days before computers, tables of such values were an essential part
>> of the engineer's [or physicist's or statistician's] toolkit and was
>> what mathematicians often spent their entire careers providing and
>> checking.  It was tedious work,
>> so was ripe for automation.
>>
>>     Babbage is remembered today for little more than these
>>     projects, but
>> he did much more than that.  His Wiki article is worth reading, if only
>> to learn the breadth of his interests and contributions.
>
>
> Babbage really was a gifted engineer and maths guy, he had enough rep
> to get the govt to front him rather a lot of money to build the
> difference engine.
>
> Apparently costs-analysis was NOT one of his best skills alas. The
> machine is devilishly complicated and was at the cutting edge of
> mechanical techniques and precision at that time.
>
> I think some MIT people finally *built* one, or a substantial part of
> one. I've seen a vid, all the brass clockwork is hypnotic to watch.

See also:

https://collection.sciencemuseumgroup.org.uk/objects/co62748/babbages-
difference-engine-no-2-2002

--
Using UNIX since v6 (1975)...

Use the BIG mirror service in the UK:
http://www.mirrorservice.org

rbowman wrote this copyrighted missive and expects royalties:

> On Fri, 27 Sep 2024 23:30:46 -0000 (UTC), Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
>
>> Back in the days when BASIC was considered “advanced” ...
>
> I don't think Beginners' All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code was ever
> considered 'advanced'.
>
> “It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that
> have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are
> mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.”
> ― Edsger Dijkstra
>
> https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/1013817.Edsger_W_Dijkstra

:-(

I got my start in high school with BASIC, keyed into a teletype and saved
to paper tape. (Later, I learned how to toggle code into the front panel of
the PDP-8.)

> He thought highly of COBOL too.
>
> “The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be
> regarded as a criminal offense.”
>
> We had a RS6000 machine named 'djikstra' (sic). It was probably named by
> the director of engineering. His personal Linux box was 'warfrat'. You
> learn about regular expressions when search code created by a person who
> couldn't spell for sour owl shit.

Heh heh, the sigmonster is eavesdropping:

--
Various documentation updates and bugfixes (the best way to know that a
stable kernel is approaching is to notice that somebody starts to
spellcheck the kernel - it has so far never failed)
-- Linus Torvalds in the annoucement for pre-2.1.99-3

In article <gJEJO.198174$kxD8.85229@fx11.iad>,
Charlie Gibbs <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> wrote:
>On 2024-09-27, R Daneel Olivaw <Danny@hyperspace.vogon.gov> wrote:
>
>> Charlie Gibbs wrote:
>>
>>> And on the operating system side, I know of
>>> OS/2, OS/3, OS/4, OS/7, and OS/9.
>>
>> OS1100 bzw. OS2200.
>
>Right, forgot about them. Univac was a big contributor to
>OS/<number>; in addition to 3, 4, and 7 above, they also
>had OS-100 and OS-500 for variations of their 9300 operating
>system that hung a Unicscope 100 or a DCT-500 terminal
>onto the machine. These were seldom used - we didn't need
>much help filling out the 32K of memory available to us.
>
>Is there an OS/5 or an OS/6 so we can complete the set
>of one-digit numbers?

c1792 on the Modular One computer:

OS6

An Operating Systems for a small computing system

Joseph Stoy and Christopher Strachey

ABSTRACT
Part I is a general description of a simple operatirg
system, which runs in a virtual machine (implemented on a real
machine by an interpreter). OS6 copes with only one user at a
time, and is not a multiprogramming system: many major problews
associated with large operating systems have therefore been avoided
or considerably simplified. It nevertheless has several features
of interest, including the fact that it is written almost entirely in
the high-level language BCPL. The most important single feature,
however, is the hierarchical nature of its control structure, which
avoids the need for a special job-control language.

Part II covers the facilities for input/output, and the
handling of files on the disc. The input/output system uses a very
general form of stream; the filing system is designed to have a clear
and logical structure.

-Gordon

Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:
> On Fri, 27 Sep 2024 02:45:23 -0400, 186282@ud0s4.net wrote:
>
>> As for lady Ada ...
>
> She saw further than anybody else what software would be about.
>
> Now, imagine an alternate universe where she hadn’t died young. Imagine
> that Charles Babbage hadn’t completely failed at building his Analytical
> Engine. (Only it was called the “Difference Engine”, for some inexplicable
> reason.)
>
> Now imagine that the two of them get together to fight crime...
>
> <https://sydneypadua.com/2dgoggles/>
>

Analytical Engine and Difference Engine were two different things, IIRC. I
can’t keep them straight, but I believe one was partially completed and did
useful work with (maybe) log tables. The other was built, or is being
built, currently from the original plans.

--
Pete

Kerr-Mudd, John <admin@127.0.0.1> wrote:
> On Thu, 26 Sep 2024 20:51:25 -0000 (UTC)
> Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:
>
>> On Thu, 26 Sep 2024 16:18:01 GMT, Charlie Gibbs wrote:
>>
>>> One of the favourite functions in my library pulls the next token from a
>>> delimited string, but as opposed to strtok() it does it
>>> non-destructively and can handle empty strings.
>>
>> Use a high-level language which has all this and more:
>>
>> for item in "the,quick,brown,fox".split(",") :
>> print(item)
>> #end for
>>
>> Output:
>>
>> the
>> quick
>> brown
>> fox
>>
>> In Python, strings are objects, and that applies to string expressions
>> (including string literals) as well.
>
> You need Rexx
>

+1

--
Pete

Bob Eager <news0009@eager.cx> wrote:
> On Thu, 26 Sep 2024 17:52:07 -0700, Peter Flass wrote:
>
>>> VAX-11 Pascal, on the other hand, was wonderful. Enough useful
>>> extensions to make it a very viable systems programming language.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>> As Lynne will be happy to tell you, the original IBM TCP/IP
>> implementation was written in IBM Pascal for VM/CMS.
>
> Who remembers PMDF on the VAX?
>

I installed it on a 750 at a prior employer.

--
Pete

Charlie Gibbs <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> wrote:
> On 2024-09-27, Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:
>
>> On Thu, 26 Sep 2024 17:52:04 -0700, Peter Flass wrote:
>>
>>> Another thing PL/I got from COBOL is “natural” string handling. Assign a
>>> short string to a larger any the result is automatically blank-padded.
>>
>> That kind of misfeature is only needed in the sad world of non-dynamic,
>> fixed-length strings ...
>
> Which for many of us was the only world that existed at the time.
>

I think still does. You wouldn’t want to print too long a name on a check,
for instance, just because your system allows it and some literal clerk
just types in what they see.

--
Pete

Andy Walker <anw@cuboid.co.uk> wrote:
> On 24/09/2024 22:14, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
> [...]
>> It didn’t help that Algol-60 had nothing resembling standardized I/O
>> facilities, whereas these were an integral feature of both Fortran and
>> COBOL.
>
> This is true, but somewhat unfair if intended as a criticism of
> A60. The idea in those days was that each computer had its own Autocode,
> each with its own idiosyncrasies [Fortran being, in essence, IBM Autocode]
> and very little commonality. Algol was a project for the expression, in
> an agreed format, of algorithms. Thus, if you wanted to invert a matrix,
> or construct a spanning tree, or numerically solve an equation, you took
> down your trusty CACM or CompJ, found an appropriate approved algorithm,
> and transcribed that into your favourite Autocode. You weren't really
> expected to write complete programs in A60. That changed later.
>
>> This was remedied later in Algol-68, at the cost of adding a lot of
>> complexity.
>
> Formats were the only complicated part of A68 [and were commonly,
> in the early days, not implemented]. That apart, the transput was easier
> than in most languages, ancient and modern. The "print" routine took one
> parameter, a list of printable things [inc positioning], and printed them.
> If you didn't want the standard printing style, there were routines to
> turn numbers into strings in easy ways.

Like PL/I PUT LIST.

>
> People complained about the size of the A68 reports, but that was
> before they saw the modern C standards, which still don't define C in the
> sort of formality that A68 achieved.
>

--
Pete

Charlie Gibbs <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> wrote:
> On 2024-09-27, R Daneel Olivaw <Danny@hyperspace.vogon.gov> wrote:
>
>> Charlie Gibbs wrote:
>>
>>> And on the operating system side, I know of
>>> OS/2, OS/3, OS/4, OS/7, and OS/9.
>>
>> OS1100 bzw. OS2200.
>
> Right, forgot about them. Univac was a big contributor to
> OS/<number>; in addition to 3, 4, and 7 above, they also
> had OS-100 and OS-500 for variations of their 9300 operating
> system that hung a Unicscope 100 or a DCT-500 terminal
> onto the machine. These were seldom used - we didn't need
> much help filling out the 32K of memory available to us.
>
> Is there an OS/5 or an OS/6 so we can complete the set
> of one-digit numbers?
>

Without looking, OS/6 sounds familiar.

--
Pete

Charlie Gibbs <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> wrote:
> On 2024-09-27, geodandw <geodandw@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> On 9/27/24 13:43, Charlie Gibbs wrote:
>>
>>> On 2024-09-27, geodandw <geodandw@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Cobol was also very portable.
>>>
>>> As long as your destination compiler supports COMP-3. :-)
>>
>> Or your source computer didn't have COMP-3, or if you didn't use it.
>
> I was once called in to optimize a CPU-bound COBOL program.
> The genius who wrote it declared all subscripts as COMP-3.
> Changing them to COMP-4 knocked 30% off the execution time.
>

BTDT. That’s why I always believed all programmers should have some
knowledge of the underlying machine architecture.

--
Pete

Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:
> On Fri, 27 Sep 2024 17:43:30 GMT, Charlie Gibbs wrote:
>
>> And on the operating system side, I know of OS/2, OS/3, OS/4, OS/7, and
>> OS/9.
>
> There was a PL/0 -- I think it was a toy example language concocted by
> Wirth to demonstrate compiler techniques.
>
> Did nobody think of coming up with an OS/0 ... ?
>
> Not even an OS/1 ...
>

OSF/1 though

--
Pete