[Elecraft] IBM's resources (OT)

[Fred Jensen]

Hmmm ... In the days of "Big Blue Iron," I don't think I ever saw a 
computer room that didn't have some card boxes on top of a file cabinet 
near the doors with a sign, "FOR 1401 EMULATION ON MIDS."

Regarding JOVIAL, said to be an acronym from, "Jules' Own Version of the 
International Algorithmic Language," its syntax is rampant with dollar 
sign characters.  "Jules" was Dr. Jules Schwartz.  Statements end with 
them, subscripts are surrounded by them, they're everywhere.

JOVIAL was for many years the official USAF language for operational 
software [may still be for all I know, Ada never seemed to get enough 
airspeed for takeoff].  It was a good definition of "cash cow" for him 
and his company. I met Dr. Schwartz at a conference once, and asked him 
if there was any significance to the prevalence of the dollar sign in 
JOVIAL syntax.  He just grinned at me.

I've occasionally wondered if Eric and Jules were related, however it's 
a pretty common name.

73,

Fred K6DGW
- Northern California Contest Club
- CU in the 2014 Cal QSO Party 4-5 Oct 2014
- www.cqp.org

On 4/4/2014 10:35 AM, Phil Kane wrote:
> On 4/3/2014 8:32 PM, Tony Estep wrote:
>
>> Don's comment reminded me of one of the great hacker stories of all time.
>> When IBM launched the 360, it obsoleted all its customers' code, because in
>> those days the machines all ran assembly language and the 360 had a
>> different instruction set. The clients screamed for an emulator, but none
>> was forthcoming. (Parenthetical note: at that time IBM was the world's most
>> profitable company and by far the largest by market capitalization.)

>
> My exposure to "big iron" in that era was on a military project where a
> special compiler for the JOVIAL language (look it up on Wiki and follow
> all the trails) was contracted for with a specific "name" company - one
> of the Air Force's "favorites" - but to the annoyance of the rest of the
> project managers they couldn't deliver on time and when they finally did
> it didn't work (I had to deal with that "up close and personal").  The
> Air Force finally took it away from them and the Blue-Suiters did the
> work in-house.  Reminds me of all the problems that Oregon's Health Care
> Signup system is going through.  Only the names have been changed to
> protect the guilty.