but most of the changes don't improve thair ability to accomplish the end item tasks that I use them for.
If you’re looking at computers as and end tool…then I somewhat agree.
But the changes I’ve seen in computer technology have drastically helped improve way bring those end products to you. You couldn’t create the programs you use to using today with the technology 20 years ago. We wouldn’t be having this conversation in this manner with technology 20 years ago.
Yes, tsm, every “improvement” that occurs seems to give those wishing to sell me something more power while complicating efforts to find the truth. A marketer can manufacture a stellar reputation and offer documentation of outstanding performance from thin air. And a search for legitimate reviews is muddled with countless phony raves. The local Chevrolet Dealer’s pop up follows me wherever I go and apparently in that dealers 30 years no one has ever made a complaint against him… AMAZING.
Points well made, Mike. I guess I’ll just never be a computer guy.
I was a latecomer to all this. My first computer class was at the age of 24. My first three high level languages were ALGOL 60, PL/1, and LISP.
That seems like such a long time ago.
My first experience with a computer was not at all pleasant. I enrolled in a doctoral program at a major university in research design and statistics in the late 1960s. Since I had taken quite a bit of work in statistics and had taught statistics prior to enrolling in the doctoral program, I was advised to start in the the second course in the sequence.
At any rate, in the first class meeting, the professor put us in pairs, gave each pair of us a large data deck of Hollerith cards and gave us an analysis of variance design that we were to perform on the data. We were to produce a printout and bring the printout to class for the next meeting. I didn’t know the keypunch from the computer. I did manage to list the cars we were to put with the data deck and the cards went something like this. In the first column of most of these cards was to be a multiple (79) punch in the first column. The sequence of cards was as follows:
(79)JOB,{our intitials for identification},5084
(79) EQUIP, 5=60
(79) EQUIP, 6 = 61
(79) RUN RESLIB = BMD08V
(79) GO
PROBLM 4 2
INDEX 16
(8(1X, F8.2))
{The data deck we were given was placed here}
FINISH
(78)(78) – Multiple (78) punch in the first 2 columns.
I had no idea what any of this meant. I knew I could do a analyis of variance with a calculator, but there was far too much data. The person I was assigned to work with had never been on a computer either. To make things more confusing, the professor originally said that the second and third cards were EQUIP 5 = 61 and 6 = 60. This brought a response from a couple of people in the class who stated that it was supposed to be 5 = 60 and 6 = 61.
At any rate, I punched up the cards and submitted the job. We got 2 runs per day on the machine which was a Control Data 3400/3600 system. If we had our job submitted by 8 in the morning, we would get it back by 4 in the afternoon. If we had it in by 4 in the afternoon, we would get it at 8 the next morning. At any rate, I submitted my job and got back a big printout of blank pages and an error message. I took my job to a “consultant” in the computer center who made me feel like the dumbest person in the world. Instead of the card PROBLM 4 2,
I had put in PROBLEM 4 2. When I made that change, the program did produce the correct output. However, I was really upset about how I was to know that “problem” was to have the "e’ left out and why 5 was supposed to equal 60 and 6 was supposed to equal 61.
I decided that I had better enroll in a computer course. Now, there were only 2 computer courses, and these courses were a one year sequence. I enrolled in the first course and went to the assigned classroom. The professor came in and said something in a language I didn’t understand and the class answered back in this language. I thought, “My gosh, you learn this computer language by speaking it and I’ve already missed a couple of meetings”. The professor then went down the first row and asked each student individually a question in this language and the student repsonded. I thought maybe I would get the gist of what was happening by the time the professor got to the second row, but I was even more confused. I was in the 3rd row and I finally asked the student next to me what class we were in. It was 3rd year Japaneze. The classrooms had been changed.
I finally found the right classroom, and after a couple of class sessions, discovered what was going on. On an IBM system, the card reader was unit #5 and the printer was unit #6. On the Control Data 3400/3600 system, the card reader was unit # 60 and the printer was unit #61. In the statistics class, we were running a program in the BIOMED (BMD) statistical package that was being called up from the drum of the machine (roughly equivalent to a disk drive today). The BMD programs were written at UCLA in FORTRANa for an IBM system. In order not to have to change things in the program, the I/O unit numbers could be changed in the system control cards. FInally, in the original FORTRAN, a variable could only be 6 characters long, so the people that wrote the BMD progrms decided to leave the “e” out of problem to make it work.
After a couple of weeks, I figured out that nobody in the class really understood how the program worked–they were just running a canned program. The only reason I didn’t quit the doctoral program the first two weeks was that we had moved into married student housing and were on the 5th floor of a building with no elevator. My back hurt so badly that I decided to tough it out for a semester. Besides, the rent was cheap–$90 a month which included utilities.
Wow, did this thread ever get hijacked.
Here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfskp4R53Q0 is the Bob Newhart Hollerith skit. Newhart has always been good.