08:30 – Happy Birthday to me. Today I turn 59 or, as I prefer to think of it, 0x3B. Or twenty thirty-nine.
Kim called yesterday. She had a computer problem, so I downloaded a virus scanner and went to her house to load and run it. As it was installing and running, we sat and talked. She mentioned that Jasmine’s 19th birthday was coming up in a couple of weeks and I mentioned that my birthday is today. She didn’t realize our birthdays were so close. I said yep, that I was two weeks older than Jas. And 40 years.
Jas has just finished her freshman year of college, and Kim was telling me about Jas’s boyfriend, who’s a year younger than she is. He’s just graduated high school, and Kim really likes him. The kid is a football star, and I found the idea of Jas dating a jock somewhat surprising, not to say worrying. Then Kim mentioned that the boy wants to go on to college and major in zoology. Ah. That’s okay, then.
Our daughter turns 20 in three days and I turn 59 myself in six weeks. And too late for me; I majored in English literature and then compounded the error by going to grad schools for it.
48 here this morning, and gee, looks like rain. Again. We might as well live in Seattle or London or the Amazon.
This article says that Obama is going to try to paint Romney as an extremist libertarian. What’s the President up to? Is he trying to get our host to vote for Romney?
Well, of those two I’d rather see Romney elected, but I don’t see how anyone could consider him even slightly libertarian, let alone extremist. Romney and Obama are inches apart on everything that matters; a real libertarian is miles away from both of them on everything.
I really dislike the idea of a mormon President. I know that sounds awful. I just think back to Clinton’s Presidency and remember all the jokes about how Hillary was really running the country. So, when I think of Romney I get this uneasy feeling that Romney will just be a puppet for the LDS elders in Salt Lake City.
I seem to recall hearing that critics of JFK thought he would be a puppet of the Pope, and yeah it does sound awful.
I will believe that Romney is a true Mormon when I can see if he is wearing that funny underwear that Mormons wear. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temple_garment)
And for the record my older brother and my mother are Mormons as are most of the family members associated with my brother. I think that religious movement is really just a cult. But I have to hand it to the church for taking care of their members. Without the support of that church my mother (when myself and my two brothers were living with her) would have been in dire straits. I don’t agree with their theological philosophy, but their support of each other is to be admired.
As a member of the Church of Christ, I believe that all other religions are cults and their members are going to Hell. That is the official line after all. Actually, I heartily do not believe that arrogant stance and have stated so many times. The Church of Latter Day Saints theology does bother me somewhat. But one cannot argue with their good works of which there are many, many, many.
I would be proud to have Mitt Romney as our President. I am not proud of Barrack Obama and find him to be boorish.
I would also like to sponsor a new federal constitutional amendment that Lawyers cannot hold public office. Having Lawyers in public office seems to be like having a fox in a hen house.
It matters not at all. We are lost. We’ll see where the chips fall when this country finally defaults. Until then everyone is apparently content to pretend that the game can go on forever.
It can’t.
Zoology has always sounded like a peculiar discipline to me. I guess because I just think of Biology as *the* life science. Also, my secondary school’s old headteacher was a zoologist, and in my mind she came to represent the idea of a fallen scientist: someone who studied science, then went to work in a tedious administrative job.
Talk of birthdays reminds me that my own birthday is sometime this month. Why was everyone I know born in the summer?
I don’t see much correlation between LDS and Catholics. While most of the LDS members I’ve met are very much commited to church doctrine and rules, most of the Catholics I’ve met could care less. Catholicism is funny in that it’s one of the few religions where people actually classify themselves into practicing or non-practicing. The majority being the latter. I would never worry that the Pope (now or 50 years ago) was running anything because the Pope/Vatican cannot even seem to run his own flock very well. Now, LDS on the other hand…. cult.
I’m not really bothered by Mormons. They’re not Christians in the proper sense of the word, but then 99% of the general population aren’t either.
I’ve wondered for many years why you don’t see many female Mormon missionaries around. Almost always they seem to be pairs of guys.
They leave the women at home because they’re barefoot and pregnant. Either that or their “missionary” work is all a front to find a woman to marry, and keep at home barefoot and pregnant.
Speaking of mormon missionaries, I almost ran over two of them yesterday.
You mean you missed? Can’t shoot straight any more, can’t drive straight.
“Getting Old is Hell.” ™
Reminds me of my favorite-ever line from a police report. It seems that a guy was in a head-on car crash with his mother-in-law, who was driving erratically. The report included the line, and I quote, “I had to swerve three times before I hit her.”
I’ve wondered for many years why you don’t see many female Mormon missionaries around.
They don’t walk the streets because they mormons don’t want street walkers. Instead the female missionaries work in the temples far removed from their home town. Why that is necessary is beyond me. In my nephews family when a child goes on a missionary trip it is a source of great pride and celebration. I guess it is a passage into adulthood. Most I think go for two years although I am not certain.
I don’t talk religion with my family as I think they are generally warped even when you are not talking about religion. In fact, I don’t much with my family at all.
There use to be a VERY attractive couple of LDS girls that did door-to-door missionary work in our neighborhood in Nebraska. I was never remotely interested in anything they had to say about the Book of Mormon, but I always made time to talk with them at length. 😉
Mitt Romney was driving a car in France that was hit by another car while on his LDS missionary journey, one of the his passengers died:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitt_Romney#University.2C_France_mission.2C_marriage_and_children:_1965.E2.80.931975
“Happy Birthday to me. Today I turn 59 or, as I prefer to think of it, 0x3B. Or twenty thirty-nine”
As an ex-CDC Cyber systems programmer I always preferred octal, so happy 73rd birthday.
It could have been worse. You could have been a PDP-8 programmer. I hate base six.
Or a PDP-11 operator like me. When I started in IT. And the only bases I am familiar with involve a sport and the military.
PDP-11s had operators? What for? What did they do?
Our CDC Cybers had tribes of operators, four shifts worth. There was a saying that “A trained monkey could operate a Cyber.” Not at all far from the truth. But I don’t see why you’d need any more than the single programmer who was working on the PDP to be operating it.
Now, VAX-11s were probably a different story. Unfortunately Adelaide Uni got Vaxes just as I was leaving so I never had much to do with them.
We had a PDP-11 running RSX and the users were CAD/CAM techies. We also had a MicroVAX running VMS 3.5 and that was for the software engineers. I maintained both machines and did backups and restores and collected printouts for distribution. From that job I moved to DEC itself and worked with their whole line of VAX/VMS machines. My last contact at all with VMS was six years ago, a VAX running 6.2 and an Alpha box running 7.1. One of my current colleagues used to also work for DEC when they had a presence here in Vermont.
And my very first personal computer was a DEC Rainbow.
DEC was my second favourite computer company, after CDC. Even though VAXes had a CISC instruction set with 2,972 different instructions I was intrigued. Cybers had about 70, many essentially the same, so Compass, the Cyber assembler, was easy to learn. I think there are still a few Cybers (may peace and blessings be upon them) running, and it’s possible to get a Cyber emulator that runs on a PC, but I’ve never found the time to customise and install it. I have very happy memories of my time learning and working on CDC gear (1977-1992) and also liked DEC gear, and hated IBM with an extreme passion.
My first computer was a Commodore Amiga 1000, bought in 1986. I was thinking about it for a while, suddenly the price halved overnight and they threw in a $300 MIR (hi Slim) so I raced out and bought one. My first real computer was a Pentium 200 MMX bought in 1997.
I have a VAX/VMS emulator, funny you should mention emulators, on this Windows 7 box right now. Just out of fond sentiment, an operating system that is running in plain English.
I got that Rainbow in 1984 and my first Windows PC was 1991. First Linux desktop was 2000 or so, running Red Hat 6.2. During my gig at EDS in the late 90s I supported, as an operator and then a sys admin, more VAX/VMS and Alpha/VMS boxes and then they gave me all the Windows NT boxes, too, and I used our host’s book on Windows NT to help me out. NT came from VMS, and code from both of those is still present in these contemporary Windows machines.
Ray wrote:
“…when I can see if he is wearing that funny underwear that Mormons wear.”
All I can say, Ray, is that you and I have different interests… 🙂
“…Kim was telling me about Jas’s boyfriend, who’s a year younger than she is. He’s just graduated high school, and Kim really likes him. The kid is a football star, and I found the idea of Jas dating a jock somewhat surprising, not to say worrying. Then Kim mentioned that the boy wants to go on to college and major in zoology. Ah. That’s okay, then.”
Damn cradle robber… 🙂
Dave, could you post a link to the emulator? Or is it payware? (I only used VMS very briefly in 1984.)
“Happy Birthday to me. Today I turn 59 or, as I prefer to think of it, 0x3B. Or twenty thirty-nine”
As an ex-IBM mainframe systems programmer I always preferred big endian systems and raw data, not the abstractions, so happy 0011-1011 th(?) birthday.
It has been a busy, rugged week. Early day again tomorrow. I had conked out shortly after supper, and was then awakened by a business phone call just before 23:00, telling me the bad news that tomorrow would start even earlier than originally planned. Of course, that call woke me up and I cannot now get back to sleep. But what is really weird is this strange, regular pounding going on somewhere in the neighborhood at 00:45. Cannot determine where it is coming from, but one of the close neighbors have been having loud marital spats, and noises like that are particularly unnerving under those circumstances. Cannot tell from which house the pounding is coming from, and there are no lights on in any of the immediately surrounding houses.
Never a dull moment in Tiny Town.
My brother was a VAX administrator (his exact title escapes me at the moment, but his job was planning and implementing the systems). At one place I worked, we had VAX throughout the building, which was replacing Wang systems (it was Boston, so all that figures). For some reason, my workstation was very limited, and my brother gave me some command-line secrets to implement, which loosened up my computing experience quite nicely. Fortunately, the system administrators where I worked, had never changed the default passwords, or I could not have made the switches.
First useful home computer was a Toshiba luggable with a 200mb hard drive.in 1989. That was replaced by a Gateway desktop in 1991, and by 1994, I was rolling my own. I was the first person I know to have networked computers—1996, I think. When we moved to Germany in 2001, we almost left with no computer, as all the towers had gone to my kids, who were beginning college. My dad had a 14″ Compaq Presario, bought at Staples around 1999, that he was not using at all, and I twisted his arm to relieve him of it. Maxed out RAM and hard drive, put all of our accumulated data on it, and that was our sole computer until 2004. That Compaq became known as ‘the computer that would not die’, as I went through 2 used Dells (imported from the US by me personally), which Dell would not service in Europe, so they became junk. I bought my current Asus laptop in 2006, and Jeri inherited the computer that would not die. I left it there when I returned after Jeri’s passing.
I am down to 2 choices for a new laptop to replace the Asus: an HP Envy series computer, or a Sager, built primarily for gaming. After extensive research, those are the only ones that support all the things I need, which include USB 3.0 and FireWire ports. Will also acquire an HP Microserver for NAS storage sometime soon, too; that will replace the elderly system my son used in college (built from one of our host’s books), which has been the NAS unit in Tiny House. Have been hoping that the Microserver price would come down to European levels (about US$200), but HP is keeping the price at US$350 and not budging here in the US, for some reason.
“It could have been worse. You could have been a PDP-8 programmer. I hate base six.”
I’m sure I would have, too. Fortunately, since I worked quite a bit on PDP-8s, they had nothing to do with base six, other than having twelve-bit words and six-bit bytes. Eights and sixty-fours, not 16s and 256s the way God intended. Octal was invented by the Devil and Mickey Mouse, not God and His Angels. Heck, you’d just get a run on, and they’d run out. Same as Honeywell and CDC and all those other computers that had inadequate numbers of digits to count on. BCD instead of EBCDIC, upper case and no lower case, five-bit Teletype with shift codes, stretch like blazes to accommodate ASCII.
Burroughs, that’s what the world needed. Virtual memory before it even got a name. Native decimal arithmetic with no rounding errors in the cents places after many billions of dollars. I worked on their absolute smallest computers – the L2000 business system and the TC500 Terminal Computer – 64-bit words, four instructions per word, 256 or sometimes 512 word address-span (=4KB, sometimes 6KB main memory). We could run an entire office and business on those!
I also worked, as an operator and trainee programmer on their B500, (change architecture) B2500, B3500, B4700 computers, change-of-architecture on their B5500, and again on their B6700 and B7700.
Don wrote:
“Octal was invented by the Devil and Mickey Mouse…”
HERESY! Octal is what humans were meant to use, that’s why we have eight fingers and eight normal toes.
Yeah, I used a B6700 for a while in the early Eighties. It’s hard to hate a computer whose operating system is written largely in Algol (the predecessor of Pascal – may peace and blessings be upon it) but Burroughs wasn’t close to CDC, perhaps because they didn’t have a Seymour Cray.
Don Armstrong says: “Burroughs, that’s what the world needed. Virtual memory before it even got a name. Native decimal arithmetic with no rounding errors in the cents places after many billions of dollars. I worked on their absolute smallest computers – the L2000 business system and the TC500 Terminal Computer – 64-bit words, four instructions per word, 256 or sometimes 512 word address-span (=4KB, sometimes 6KB main memory). We could run an entire office and business on those!
I also worked, as an operator and trainee programmer on their B500, (change architecture) B2500, B3500, B4700 computers, change-of-architecture on their B5500, and again on their B6700 and B7700.”
Wow, another Burroughs trained killer. I worked on the medium systems most of my career in the USAF and afterwards at a large commercial bank. Loved those machines.
I got heavily involved in the software innards of the MCP. Even wrote my own module with an option to turn off or on “TO” command. This option allowed for the control of the printer backup file numbers. All done in machine code and then patched into the MCP.
Most of my work was done in COBOL (Enter Symbolic was kool), ASMBLR and some BPL thrown in when needed.
While in the USAF we designed our own languages and developed compilers for the languages. The functional people (we call them turnips affectionately) wrote the application rules and statements in our language, we ran that through our compilers and produced pseudo code or in a couple of cases direct machine code. The psueudo got interpreted, the machine got loaded as an overlay and directly executed.
Later on that project required that the compilers be trans-morphed to the B-6900. We converted from ASMBLR to Algol by basically rewriting everything. Generating B-3500 machine code (which was decimal, no fixed words per say) using a machine that had fixed 64 bit word sizes was an adventure. Lots of string operations in Algol.
At one point in my career I was flown to Pasadena to interview with the MCP folks. I was offered the job before I finished the interview. I deferred my decision and later I declined because I did not want to live in Pasadena. But it was interesting group of people. Only interview where I was given some code to fix, not so much to see if I could do it, but to give me something to do the rest of the day. The actual interview only lasted 15 minutes before the offer was made. They asked if I was willing to work on something while I was there and I did. They all treated me like I was already employed.
t’s hard to hate a computer whose operating system is written largely in Algol
There were actually several versions of Algol with added extensions based on the end goal. DCAlgol was one such derivative. They were all based on Algol.
I did do some work in DCAlgol while working on the cross compilers. I needed to create a unique protocol that would allow the B-6700 to talk with a B-3500 quickly rather than using Poll-select. It was a modified contention protocol that had error checking and correction in all the messages. The resulting code from the cross compilers was transferred from the B-6700 to the B-3500 using that protocol. I also had to write some code for the B-874 communications processor.
Native decimal arithmetic with no rounding errors in the cents places after many billions of dollars.
You could multiply two 100 digit numbers and get a 200 digit (not bits) response accurate to the last digit using a single multiply instruction. You could divide a 100 digit number by a 25 digit number and get a 75 digit response accurate to the last digit. You could use any combination of numbers as long as the final result was 100 digits or less.
Instructions were 6, 8, 18 or 24 digits. Addresses were 100% human readable as they were decimal. Programs could be relocated in memory by simply moving the code and changing a base register. Even loaded programs could be moved around by the MCP. No address resolution was required.
Oh, and to clarify. There really was no cents in any of the math operations on the Burroughs as there was no decimal point at all. Cents was accomplished by scaling the results in the display. Made it interesting in ASMBLR as you had to do the scaling yourself. COBOL handled the scaling for you.
Yep. I did my first commercial programming on a Burroughs B-80.