I can't really tell if no more answers are coming in or things are
just very slow but I'll try to fill in the answers to my questions
that have not been answered.
Looks like the questions about the floppy drive (or should I say
drives as I had the luxury of dual drives) are the ones that need some
answers. The manufacture (now gone) was Micropolis and they later made
hard drives that we used on our UNIX boxes when we moved off the main
frame about ten years ago. The hard sectored disks had holes to
separate the sectors (the holes were much to large to separate
tracks). Micropolis used a 16 hard sector floppy and then soft
sectored each hard sector into two. They had an ad about never so many
tracks that showed railroad tracks.
Yes, Logo was based on LISP.
It was very bad practice to use loops in APL. They were avoided by
using vectors. I calculated some very actuate statistical tables for
my husband on a DEC-10 using APL and picking the exact (rather than
approximated values) out of the vector in about the time frame that
this discussion started with - some time in the early 80s. We also had
APL on the CP/M machine (a Vector Graphics if anyone is curious) but
it didn't have precision of the DEC-10 and later got a DOS version. I
know it was the thing to try to do everything in one line but it was
also possible to write readable code (as long as you knew the symbols)
and of course there was always the lamp for comments.
Speaking of on the CP/M machine and later a DOS version, I would think
that the word processor that was being asked about was probably
WordStar. We had that one on the CP/M machine (it was considered THE
word processor at that time) and then DOS before WordPerfect. Actually
had a strange experience installing the DOS version. I can't remember
how much memory we had on that machine but it was a lot for it's day
and WordStar gave me an error that I had insufficient memory. After
checking everything I could think of, I installed a RAM disk to cut
the memory down to a size mentioned in the documentation and low and
behold the WordStar worked.
IBM standard label tapes could actually be cartridges (3480/3490 or
are those obsolute now?). The thing about them (besides EBCDIC which
no one not on an IBM used) is that they had three files for one
logical file. The header and footer(?) contained documention. In
addition to the format stuff they could contain: a file name, the
operating system under which the file was written, the date, and I
think even some sort of machine ID. If the first file, the header also
had a volumn ID. I did help to set up a system in perl under AIX that
would compare the information in a header with information that we had
other places including an Oracle database, did some other things, and
put information into the database. It would have been a lot harder
without those standard label tapes.
Yes, I have used punch cards. The first computer I used was an
IBM/1620. My first work with stat packages, SAS, SPSS, BMDP, was on
a remote machine where the job was submitted on punch cards and if I
remember correctly the jobs were not run when submitted but at a later
time so that an out of order card or incorrectly punched one could
make things a very slow process.
Pat
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Author: Pat Hildebrand
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