I thought it was me . .joined IBM the same day as the 360 was announced -------------------------------------------- On Thu, 3/9/17, Anne & Lynn Wheeler <l...@garlic.com> wrote:
Subject: Re: curious: why S/360 & decendants are "big endian". To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU Date: Thursday, March 9, 2017, 7:26 PM john.archie.mck...@gmail.com (John McKown) writes: > Same in other books I've seen. Why? Probably because we write from top to > bottom. We write the lowest first, at the top, and the highest last, at the > bottom. And then we confuse everybody by calling them "ascending" memory > addresses while writing them in a descending pattern. English is a _stupid_ > language. in the 70s as fullscreen 3270s editors were starting to appear, there was big editor culture wars over up & down. prior to that, line-editing was from perspective of the user ... "up" moving towards the "top" (beginning) of the file and "down" was moving towards the "bottom" (end) of the file. The side that had enhanced previous line editors to support 3270 fullscreen and preserved the up/down orientation (meaning). A couple of "new" 3270 fullscreen editors, done from scratch, insisted on "up" was from the orientation of the program (not the user), the program would move the file up ... towards the bottom of the file or move the file "down" ... towards the top of the file (difference was` whether up/down was from the human perspective or the program/software perspective). -- virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
