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Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> It still slightly frightens me that Haskell is actually this old... Just
> think how much better the world could be today if its ideas had caught
> on back then?
A lot of the stuff you take for granted wasn't possible back then.
It's like "how much cooler would movies be if the ideas behind modern GPUs
caught on back when we were still using discrete transistors and core memory?"
--
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
Ada - the programming language trying to avoid
you literally shooting yourself in the foot.
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Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> Files only on disk? Or on tape too?
Obviously tape files were contiguous. I must be misunderstanding what
you're asking.
>>> Interesting. So the system actually "knows" where each field of a
>>> record is then?
>>
>> Records were fixed size, so it was trivial to calculate.
>
> OK. But does the system know where the *fields* in a record are? Or just
> what size the records are?
You compiled it into the program. Often when they weren't actually fixed
size, they were fixed size anyway and padded (like cards). Or the size was
stored in the header of the file.
> Yeah, I think the term "mainframe" is probably obsolete now. There are
> probably more exact ways to describe what type of computer you mean.
Could be. There's something clearly between "small" and "large" now.
--
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
Ada - the programming language trying to avoid
you literally shooting yourself in the foot.
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Clarence1898 wrote:
> You can run Linux on an IBM z/series machine, just like on a PC.
Actually, last I read, you could run some 300 Linux VMs on a z/series
machine without noticing a slow-down. :-)
--
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
Ada - the programming language trying to avoid
you literally shooting yourself in the foot.
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Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> So it must have been possible to process larger datasets than that somehow.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/External_sorting
--
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
Ada - the programming language trying to avoid
you literally shooting yourself in the foot.
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andrel wrote:
> 1980, except that it was the next day and not six months later.
To be clear, they pretty much stopped making that sort of machine in the
late 70s, but many of them lasted into the 90s before they ahd to be
retired, often for lack of parts.
--
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
Ada - the programming language trying to avoid
you literally shooting yourself in the foot.
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>> Files only on disk? Or on tape too?
>
> Obviously tape files were contiguous. I must be misunderstanding what
> you're asking.
From what little I've seen, with punch cards it's a case of "please
read this bunch of cards". You don't have filenames or anything.
Presumably on magnetic disk you have a file *system* which describes
logical files with names and things. I'm asking whether the same holds
for tape, or whether it's just treated as an endless stream of bytes (or
records or whatever).
>> OK. But does the system know where the *fields* in a record are? Or
>> just what size the records are?
>
> You compiled it into the program. Often when they weren't actually fixed
> size, they were fixed size anyway and padded (like cards). Or the size
> was stored in the header of the file.
Right. So it's a property of the program, not the system.
>> Yeah, I think the term "mainframe" is probably obsolete now. There are
>> probably more exact ways to describe what type of computer you mean.
>
> Could be. There's something clearly between "small" and "large" now.
Minicomputers! :-D
--
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*
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>> So it must have been possible to process larger datasets than that
>> somehow.
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/External_sorting
See, now sometimes discussions can throw up interesting stuff - and it's
not all of purely historical interest. ;-)
--
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*
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Darren New wrote:
> To be clear, they pretty much stopped making that sort of machine in the
> late 70s, but many of them lasted into the 90s before they ahd to be
> retired, often for lack of parts.
Now that's reliability engineering for ya.
--
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*
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Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> I'm asking whether the same holds
> for tape, or whether it's just treated as an endless stream of bytes (or
> records or whatever).
Oh, I see. It depends whether you are using a labeled tape or an unlabeled
tape. I.e., that depends on the OS.
> Right. So it's a property of the program, not the system.
Again, depends on the OS. On the really primitive ones, it was a property of
the program. On the really modern ones, it's also a property of the program.
On the ones in between, they made it a property of the files.
--
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
Ada - the programming language trying to avoid
you literally shooting yourself in the foot.
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Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> Now that's reliability engineering for ya.
Indeed. That's another important differentiation.
--
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
Ada - the programming language trying to avoid
you literally shooting yourself in the foot.
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