can x^2 + y^2 = square root of -4?

In Blinky the Shark spewed forth:

In the snow.

 

Well when I first started work we were issued with either a slide rule
or an abacus!!!!

 

Abacus? You must've gone to a private school. We got a stick, and had to
bring our own dirt.

 

I even had a car once that had a crank starter as well as electric one. It
was a 1950 English Ford. One very cold morning it wouldn't start even when
fully choked. So I trotted out the hand crank and it started. Try that with
a 400 HP 6 liter engine with a 9.0 to 1 compression ratio. Could even a
heavy weight weight lifter do that?
FK

 

barefoot.
FK

 

Can't remember how many Cobol programs I wrote on punched cards!

Remember the "program card" wrapped on the drum for the IBM or Univac punch
card machine?

My favourite was watching a 4 reel tape sort in action - that was too
cool!!!

 

In Martik spewed forth:

Whoa - gotta video clip?

 

Wish I did.

This might interest you (from wikipedia):

"Merge sort is so inherently sequential that it's practical to run it using
slow tape drives as input and output devices. It requires very little
memory, and the memory required does not change with the number of data
elements. If you have four tape drives, it works as follows:

1.. divide the data to be sorted in half and put half on each of two tapes
2.. merge individual pairs of records from the two tapes; write two-record
chunks alternately to each of the two output tapes
3.. merge the two-record chunks from the two output tapes into four-record
chunks; write these alternately to the original two input tapes
4.. merge the four-record chunks into eight-record chunks; write these
alternately to the original two output tapes
5.. repeat until you have one chunk containing all the data, sorted ---
that is, for log n passes, where n is the number of records.
On tape drives that can run both backwards and forwards, you can run merge
passes in both directions, avoiding rewind time. For the same reason it is
also very useful for sorting data on disk that is too large to fit entirely
into primary memory."



Remember in those days 64K was a lot of memory.

 

In Martik spewed forth:

Oh yeah - I used to work in 16K. Sorts were tough! When I finally got a
machine with 64K I was ecstatic. That was a TRS80 Model III. Later, they
came out with one that had 128K but a user could only access the extra 64
with some fun direct programming. I could do BIG sorts then <g>! Since these
were early "desktops" there were no external tape bays...or even 4 floppy
drives (which could have been used in a similar fashion) so most sorting was
all done in RAM. I normally used a Shell-Metzner sort - small code size,
fast execution, excellent stuff. Nowadays, I couldn't even begin to write
code

 

Hey, waddaya think I am, old or something?

And now we watch the clothes tumble around in the dryer. Where did we go
wrong?

 

I discovered the Shell sort back in my Honeywell mainframe days. But for
large sorts we used the 6ft high
tape drives. IIRC 20-30k records would take 1/2 hr to sort. When we finally
got the 20MB disk drives that were the size of a washing machine we started
doing disksorts. We programmers would have fun by allocating the sort work
and source files on opposite ends of the platter so the heads would go
crazy.

Check out these sort comparisons: (click on the horizontal bars to compare
speeds)
http://www.cs.ubc.ca/spider/harrison/Java/sorting-demo.html

 

I had a small catalog with 30mm records in it, it was a simple task, but
it took forever. In those days I had a simple 386sx16 and a single
drive, it would run non-stop for 20+ days, all due to drive head
movement overhead.

I got smart after the first day and bought a second 30MB disk and
managed to do the sort in 13 hours.

It's funny how people don't understand head movement performance or
fragmentation performance on todays computers.

 

Solar^ wrote:

I'm not sure if this is the forum for this but here goes:

Do computers worry you?

 

Solar^ wrote:

I'm not sure I understand you fully.

 

Budweiser wrote:

Do you sometimes wish you were looking for?

 

philo wrote:

Does thinking of a lot of it from when you was in engineering school bring anything else to mind?

 

Mike Easter wrote:

Tell me more about that.

 

Blinky the Shark wrote:

Does this topic make you feel angry ?

 

Gordon wrote:

We were discussing you -- not me.

 

old jon wrote:


Does talking about this bother you?