UNIX funny, classic computing relevant

[Brad Parker]

Kelly Fergason wrote:
>
>Yeah, I'm 45, and just missed punch cards in college.   and I'm not
>complaining...

just missed...  mmm. I still smile when i think of drum card hacking
and how that was so impressive to some people.  anyone who used card
for any length of time could fire off a drum card. 

it's the same today as firing off some emacs lisp to rebind a key.

cards/batch imposed a certain discipline which was useful.  I don't miss
cards but being forced to review your code was a good thing, imho.

oddly, I still spent 2 days finding a single character bug in fortran
code (on cards) and much much later, 3 weeks finding a single character
bug in C (on a unix box).  some things don't change.

heck, the other day I found a single character bug in some C code.

#define blah (1 < 3)

but it was *supposed* to be (1 << 3)

I got 0 when I wanted 8.  but it still compiled and ran.  for weeks  :-(

-brad