Great Western Coffee Shop

A query for the admins, just wondering why an 'i' has appeared at the top left of the forum over the past few days?

Now I see it ...

Now I don't.

Sorry about that - the extra "i" was added in error when I pasted in the JavaScript code to improve the like button. Now fixed.   It was only today I was teaching about testing to make sure that one positive change doesn't have a negative effect elsewhere ... sometimes easier said than done!

Too true. Used to have a Senior Programmer who always asked when a bug fix failed.

"Repeat after me, "The only other change I made was....."

I remember working as a Programmer about 20 years ago on one of the early mis-selling scandals. I was working Saturday overtime and had to produce about 20,000 letters to customers. We coded the letter, proof-read it and proof-read it again and again. All was approved, so we ordered the final print run. Only after the first half dozen boxes of letters had been produced did we spot a rather glaring error where a ^ sign had been replaced by a $. So we aborted the run and re-coded the letter - just a simple single-character substitution  ::) so it was done and the print job started again.  The change had been done successfully, but somehow the printer control had been mucked up and each page had just a single line printed.

Much egg on face and more than a dozen boxes of special stationery ruined! Oops  :-[

In the days when I used to do programming I was told there was no such thing as a one-line code change and they always came in pairs..

1st line would fix the original problem as reported
2nd line would fix the bug introduced by the first one.

I was also told the phrase "one off program" was the name given to a standard utility prior to its second run...

Oh, this takes me back!

Anyone else remember card readers?!

You aren't anyone until you have dropped your cards!  :)

I know - I have. And it was a long time ago ...  :o

And if that deck of cards happens to be the bootstrap loader for a mainframe it doesn't go down (or come back up) well

Paper tape was safer! (for bootstraps).

Do you remember the Mohawk readers ?!

No, just a simple SAS run for several hundred analyses. Still it took hours to fix and several false starts.  A colleague of mine managed to 'bend a pin' on the same mainframe through the departmental modem - you know, the one where the telephone handset was placed in the modem's cradle.  But then he was a disaster waiting to happen!


The continuous paper-tape loop on the replica Colossus at Bletchley Park is humbling to behold. Respect!

I did do some programming in the days of punched tape and cards.  I do not recall ever dropping my cards, but I do remember the frightening message back from the operators - "Sorry the computer chewed your cards - please retype!"

I also remember typing a command line to load a programme - "Copy from pecker to memory" or sometimes, when starting from scratch, "Copy to memory".

I also when doing data logging out on site (In this http://www.departmentals.com/photo/901601 (http://www.departmentals.com/photo/901601))having to start the generator early so that we could use the hair dryer to dry out the paper tape punch that logged our data. Leaving it in a damp railway siding overnight was not good for the punch paper tape machines. That gave us time for to make and have tea before we started work.