[RANTISH] Programming Stupidity

From: John Ruschmeyer <jruschme_at_hiway1.exit109.com>
Date: Fri Apr 9 10:10:21 1999

> Wonderful quote from my boss, who's (supposed to be a professional programmer
> for Caterpillar):
> "You should use strings instead of integers. You can put bigger numbers in
> a string."

Sounds a little like a BASIC I used to work with...

My first job out of college was programming in BASIC-X, the proprietary
dialect used on the BTI-5000 and BTI-8000 minis. One of its features was
"string arithmetic" which allowed you to store arbitrary precision
numbers in strings and perform the normal mathematical functions.

Example:

        10 DIM A$(10), B$(10)
        20 A$="12345678.90"
        30 B$="34567890.10"
        40 A$=A$+B$
        50 PRINT B$

Handy for big dollar calculations like Bill Gates' net worth or the
annual budget reconciliation.

Out of curiousity, am I the only one on the list to have ever seen one
of these beasts?

The 5000 (I think there were also 4000 and possibly 6000) systems were
small refrigerator-sized boxes that were used in turnkey apps like car
dealerships.

The 8000 was a marvel- 1981 vintage 32-bit symmetric mutiprocessor. Big
19" cabinets, standard CDC washing machine drives, etc. Most diagnostcs
were performed remotely and it was often possible to restart a crashed
system without losing any work. Unfortunately, as far ahead of its time
as the BTI-8000 was, it suffered from lousy system software and languages.
BASIC-X ran in a compatability mode (an RM-derived BASIC was killed off
shortly after the 1.0 release); the FORTRAN compiler was buggy as hell;
and PASCAL was the only language that let you get anywhere near the
hardware. Towards the end, their great claim to fame was their "Hot COBOL"
compiler, a native-code compiler which replaced a Ryan-MacFarland-derived
interpreted one, which they tried to compete against the HP-3000 with.

If ever a box deserved a Unix port...

The one I worked on at Monmouth College was decommisioned in approx. 1989.
I recall there being one in the mayors office of the City of New York, but
I don't know of any others.

<<<John>>>
Received on Fri Apr 09 1999 - 10:10:21 BST