"What does APL stand for? What was very bad practice in APL that other
languages use? What was used instead?"
A Programming Language. Not sure of the other questions, but I remember
learning the greek alphabet when I was using APL. Very powerful
vector-oriented language. You could write one-line programs to accept a
list of numbers, and spit out the average, mean, stand. dev., max, min and
about anything else. Pretty cool, except that picking up someone elses
program to debug was a bitch!
Tom Mercadante
Oracle Certified Professional
-----Original Message-----
Sent: Wednesday, August 01, 2001 11:10 PM
To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L
I think this is very dependent on one's age and maybe geographic
location. Okay, I'll start off by showing my age. In 1981 I wasn't in
high school - my older son was.
I wasn't a ham but back, I think as a pre-teen, we used to make
"telegraphs" out of a piece of scrap wood, a flashlight bulb, a
battery, a few nails, a little wire, and a strip of metal cut from a
tin can to practice Morse code (I don't remember any of it now).
I had to pass a slide rule test in college but in those days so did
everyone else at Harvey Mudd.
When I saw the question about boot disks I figured that the answer
would be very dependent on the computer because I know there were
computers at that time that didn't use disks. However, the computer
that I got in 1981 required a boot disk.
In fact that computer brings to mind a few other questions from that
time. Before the introduction of the IBM PC, what was considered the
operating system for business micro computers? What manufacturer made
a 5 1/4 floppy drive that used a format with 100 tracks per inch (they
actually had more data on a single sided disk than IBM had on their
double sided disk)? What is the difference between hard sectored and
soft sectored floppies? What did the above mentioned drive use?
Some other questions that come to mind that are not so tied into a
specific machine are:
What does APL stand for? What was very bad practice in APL that other
languages use? What was used instead?
What is the language that uses a turtle for teaching children about
computers? What language was it based on?
Or how about something from the days of main frame tapes that has come
back to haunt me lately. What is an IBM standard label tape? What
about it might help in identifying what is on the tape and where it
came from?
Pat
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Author: Pat Hildebrand
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