I had a split assignment teaching classes and working as a research design consultant in my tenure as a professor at a university. One project required the use of a statistic that fit the project but was not a widely used statistic. I ran a widely used statistical package and ran the data. The results did not seem to make sense. I made up a simple example and did the hand calculations. I then used the data in my simple example through the statistical package the university purchased for the VAX computer cluster. The results from the computer program were not correct. I made contact with the nationally known company that wrote the statistical software. Within a month, the company supplied a computer patch that fixed the error in the software.
I seem to remember a problem with I believe a math coprocessor chip. I believe these chips were recalled and replaced with an updated chip. Also, a well known company that made calculators had a chip where I believe there was an error in one of the trigonometric functions. Someone has to write the code that is 6burned into the chips.
Yup!
A guy with whom I attended college was a cheat from the word âgoâ, but he managed to bamboozle enough people to work his way up the personnel ladder until he was appointed to the post of Superintendent of Schools. Most of the underlings knew that he was as crooked as a country road, andâfinallyâhe was caught red-handed trying to extort kickbacks from suppliers.
A lot of the peons like me had a few chuckles when he was convicted, lost his job, paid a fine, and took a major reduction in his pension. He moved to a different state in order to try to flee from the shame of it all.
It happens. But Iâll still say very rarely. Programming methods today are far better than they were when the Vax (cluster) was a high-end computer. OOP and OOD for one. Design patterns. When I worked at DEC and programming on the VAX - the language was C/C++. Both languages had a lot of problemsâŠespecially with memory management. More advanced languages like Java and C# have really mitigated a lot of those inherent problems with C++. Garbage collection built into Java and C# virtually eliminated memory leaks. Besides advances in languages thereâs new methodolgies like Agile. Back in my Vax days everything was Waterfall. Agile is so much better and cleaner.
Itâs a lot easier to write cleaner and more robust code today than it was just 20 years ago.
Yep. I was In Federal service, HR and the local big boss bent over backwards protecting the guy supervisor they hired.
Finally, a coworker got Federal police (locally we had rent-a-cops) involved, then he was fired, actually allowed to retire.
@MikeInNH The first computer language I used was FORTRAN. I then did assembly language programming on a Control Data 6600. I then was assigned to teach computer courses even though my degree was in statistics. I taught a class where we did assembly language programming on an IBM. A couple years later, we did assembly language programming on a DEC-10 and in later years, the assembly language programming for the course was done on the VAX.
Programming in different assembly languages for different computers is analogous to driving different years and makes of automobiles. The controls may be in different places, but the underlying principle of driving remains the same. I was explaining this to a class and told them that I knew only four things about driving a car. Turning the wheel clockwise makes the car go to the right. Turning the wheel counterclockwise makes the car go left. The right pedal makes the car go and the left pedal stops the car. My wife is the only one who knows how to work the heating and air conditioning and I roast in the winter and freeze in the summer. My son has the infotainment system set on a rock station at 100 db and I have no idea how to turn it off. I have no idea how the lights and wipers are operated, but I wouldnât use them anyway because they are for wimps. Just knowing the four things allows me to drive the car anyplace I want to go. I then gave.the class the basic commands for the assembly language and said and had them write a program. We then would add the extra features analogous to the HVAC, system, the infotainment system and the lights and wipers.
The analogy was lost on one graduate student in the class. My wife was an administrator in the graduate office. The student went to her office with a problem, saw my picture on Mrs. Triedaqâs desk and said, âDoes your husband really drive a car and never use the lights or wipersâ?
In another assembly language class, I made an assignment for the students to write a program to sort a set of data. I showed the students several different sort methods. One student came to my office a couple days later and said that the assignment was impossible because the assembly language didnât have a sort command. To me, it was like saying that itâs impossible to drive the car because it doesnât have an automatic transmission. In assembly language one uses the primitive commands in a program to do the data sort just as in a manual transmission one selects the right gear to get the car moving from a stop and then use different gears to get the car up.to cruising speed.
So are we into 14 or 15 months now? Really there is no good answer except maybe just buy another car in the meantime,
I have had two long term issues or at least seemed long term. I waited three months to get my car back on a transmission overhaul. Hassled the guy every other day. It sat in their shop collecting dust all torn apart. Not practical to tow it out so just had to wait him out. I did get revenge by reporting him for sales tax fraud. Turned out he was half a million short on his tax payments.
Then my snow blower was a little over a year old and had engine problems. The authorized Briggs guy in town finally concluded that it needed a new engine. Problem was the guy was broke and had to first pay for the engine and then get reimbursed, it was 11 months before he called to come get it. I had nearly given up. Used the plow on my mower for a while, then broke out the kids blower that I was storing. So I had a back up anyway. Eventually these things work themselves out but you have to protect yourself in the meantime.
Mine too was Fortran. My first few years out of college I worked at DOD jobs. At the time Fortran was the only approved DOD language. I left the DOD type jobs by the time ADA came around. I did assembly on PDP-11âs and 8086. But languages like C and Decâs Bliss eliminated the need for most programming in assembly.
Thatâs for sure. My only foray into a computer programming job was in the early 70âs. The computer only had 128 K bytes of memory, total. There were 15 programmers writing the program segments in assembly language, all designed to run on that computerâs 128K bytes. The memory limitation made the job very tedious, programs coming into memory to run, then out they went to make room for the next one. We programmers had to justify the use of every single byte. After a year or two, I decided computer programming wasnât the job for me.
A lot of that was controlled with the Operating system via memory swapping. It would swap out portions of the program in RAM with portions of the program on disk. On large computers a drum storage device was dedicated to this task due to itâs increased speed over a disk-drive. But any time the OP is doing memory swapping - itâs a HUGE drain on performance. Iâve always told people who asked for advice on getting a faster PC to get as much memory as you can afford. Most of the time itâs more important than a faster processor.
128K in the 70âs was pretty good. One of my first jobs was programming on a PDP-11/70 with 64kb. My apple watch has 16gb or memory.