On the Outside Looking In (1 Viewer)

I've been working in environmental and land-use planning for over 30+ years. I always had an interest in computers, did my first programming while in college in the late 60s. Used a "teletype" terminal to write the code (basic) also used punch cards (FORTRAN). Fortunately I never dropped my box of cards. I also would race over to the computer center at 3 AM to see how my jobs ran. No real-time execution (for students) back then; batch jobs only. In retrospect, I wonder why I never switched my major? By the way, the computer paper was excellent for exam preparation and writing out study notes.

Are you familiar with 1000+ page environmental impact statements? Fortunately they are on-line now as PDF documents. But back in the early 1980s it required an editorial staff and a team of typists. We acquired a UNIX computer and I was able to write the program that allowed the staff to work on their sections and to automatically assemble the the various sections into one complete document! Should you ever suffer from insomnia, reading one of these documents will cure you. Trust me.

What has been interesting over the years in watching the evolution of the personal computer in the work environment. The introduction of the personal computer along with programs (such as Access) has "freed" professional staff from dependency on the IT staff. For example, I have been able to develop an Access permit tracking database without IT staff "assistance". This forum has been exceedingly helpful. I need to thank all those who have helped me solve my problems.

As another casual observation, at one place where I worked, a "new" mainframe application (batch processing) was introduced at the time the personal computer exploded into the corporate world. Essentially, this mainframe application was dead on arrival and totally obsolete to boot. It was a flat database where many of the easy to use features of dBase (at the time) were missing. As a person familiar with the capabilities of a PC and not even an IT professional, I was flabbergasted by this exceedingly "primitive" implementation. I would have thought that the IT staff would have been more forward looking and innovative. I suspect that the IT staff was blissfully unaware of what the then new personal computers could do. Fortunately, we now have forums such as this one that make it possible for users to developed their own customized solutions.

I have rambled and reminisced for too long.

Having worked (a LONG time ago) in the Oil & Gas pipeline industry, I understand the nastiness of Environmental Impact Statements. We had a little module in our customized report writer that created the details section of the EIS based on log files and current data, and then tacked "boiler plate" segments in front and rear, customized a couple of other segments, and assembled the result for printing on a high-quality printer using a typesetting tool modified for PostScript printers. Our customers loved us for writing the bulk of their EIS for them. And trust me, with a leaky pipeline, you filed a LOT of EIS packages.

We had a minicomputer application that eventually suffered the same fate as your mainframe D.O.A. product. But back then, say about 1975-1985 time-frame, the typical PC couldn't handle the number of devices we had to handle or the amount of data that had to be memory-resident to make real-time programs work right. Therefore our mini-computer application, heavy with various kinds of telemetry operations, survived for a long time. Yet it, too, went the way of the Great Auk and the Dodo.

Welcome aboard. I'm glad to see someone else has a little experience in looking at the long-term progression of the computer industry. Some of the kids on this forum don't have a clue to the guts of the systems on which they work. But if we are careful, some of them may pick up something through osmosis if nothing else.

Sounds like someone may have used an English Electric Leo Marconi KDF8 computer, the size of a small hangar.

Col

I never worked on one but I have heard of them. They cut down on your winter season heating bills because you could just recirculate their heat to other areas.

Our old KA-10 (DECsystem-10) mid-frame at Univ. of New Orleans was like that.

The_Doc_Man said:

I never worked on one but I have heard of them. They cut down on your winter season heating bills because you could just recirculate their heat to other areas.

Our old KA-10 (DECsystem-10) mid-frame at Univ. of New Orleans was like that.

Click to expand...

Of course, you'd have to store the thing outside just to keep it cool enough to operate.

Which, in New Orleans, meant you couldn't run it in summer. No, we had air conditioning for it. But right after Katrina, when our office was in Fort Worth, a lot of the serves we stood up there overwhelmed the A/C often enough that we would open the back door on cold days. The operations crew didn't really like that, and it played hob with the room humidity, but the machines stayed cool. Most of the time.