• (cs) in reply to kinz
    kinz:
    "Hitchcock" River sounds a lot like the Cuyahoga...
    I'm thinking the Susquehanna.
  • John (unregistered) in reply to Bob
    Bob:
    Old TOPS-10 Dude:
    Kensey:
    Ollie Jones:
    And the VAX text editor was indeed a miserable crock. It was called teco.

    Then again, that miserable crock motivated the creation of what eventually became the OS we know as emacs, which lacks only a decent editor to be useful.

    I remember TECO. I hated TECO. OTOH, I did like that you could produce useful results in your text buffer by starting TECO and just whacking the crap out of the acoustic coupler. Random line noise made a fine command stream for TECO.

    I remember EVE on VAX boxen, wasn't tooooo bad.

    Eve Online?

  • (cs) in reply to Bob
    Bob:
    KattMan:
    Anon:
    I'm pretty sure that hot lab assistants only exist on CSI.

    Lies! They exist on NCIS also. Oh wait, Abby isn't an assistant is she?

    Abby doesn't fit the criteria in the first place. Forced-adult-goth is more irritating and saddengingly fake than her just being normal. Take out the obvious and overwhelming stereotypical goth stuff about her, and then she'd fit just fine.

    What about her doesn't fit? Ok, I admit, I'm an old goth myself. But the actress herself is totally hot, and was going to school for forensics before getting into acting, so she actually knows the stuff she is prenteding to do. Pretty, intelligent and fun, who could ask for more?

  • (cs)

    A "PC compatible" wouldn't have a 3 MHz processor, since the real 8088 and its clones ran at a minimum of 4.77 MHz.

    Of course, we all know this isn't actually a WTF. If anything, this guy is a pretty good hacker and actually REDUCED the WTFs. Why the heck was a modem being used to transfer files between an instrument and a PC when both devices appear to have standard serial interfaces? And using a VAX to process the data would have been a great idea (a pretty powerful 32-bit CPU running at 50-100 MHz as opposed to a 16-bit CPU with an 8-bit bus running at 4.7 MHz) if they actually had a decent phone line and a modem that wasn't already obsolete.

  • (cs) in reply to JamesQMurphy
    JamesQMurphy:
    The AT came out in 1984, and I was still playing with my acoustic 300 baud modem at the time.
    Me, too. I remember looking forward longingly to the day when I could afford to upgrade to the lightning-fast 9600 baud.
  • (cs) in reply to amischiefr
    amischiefr:
    Code Dependent:
    Why are the women all relegated to subordinate roles in which their main feature is appearance? What would be really cool is if "Gary" was instead "Mary".
    Because objectifying women is fun? </shrug> What are we supposed to look at, their personalities? Fuck that. Show me some titties!@
    You couldn't look at Mary's titties? Or is it a control issue, too?
  • (cs) in reply to eric76
    eric76:
    Ollie Jones:
    And the VAX text editor was indeed a miserable crock. It was called teco.
    I used to use Teco on PDP-11's, but I dont' remember ever even seeing it on a VAX.

    I've often wished I had a copy I could use on my OpenBSD machines.

    Still on VMS 8.2:

    EDIT

  /TECO

       Invokes the TECO interactive text editor. The /TECO qualifier is
       required.

       Format

         EDIT/TECO  [file-name]

         EDIT/TECO/EXECUTE=command-file  [argument]



    Additional information available:

    Parameter  Qualifiers
    /COMMAND   /CREATE    /EXECUTE   /MEMORY    /OUTPUT    /READ_ONLY
    Examples
  • Walleye (unregistered)

    "GW Basic (which the computer snobs called "Gee-Wiz Basic")

    The called it that because that's what GW stood for.

  • iToad (unregistered) in reply to eric76
    eric76:
    Ollie Jones:
    And the VAX text editor was indeed a miserable crock. It was called teco.
    I used to use Teco on PDP-11's, but I dont' remember ever even seeing it on a VAX.

    I've often wished I had a copy I could use on my OpenBSD machines.

    TECO worked just fine on ASR-33 and Silent 700 teletypes. Besides, you could type in your name as a TECO command, and figure out what it did.

    We used TECO on PDP-11s only. For VAXes, we used EDT, KED, or LSE.

    I didn't use serial ports for networking. Instead, when I built my do-it-yourself PDP-11 network, I used IEEE-488 (GPIB).

  • (cs) in reply to Anonymous
    Anonymous:
    Oh God, I remember that crap - "95% IBM compatible". Great, but that 5% makes a whole heap of difference...

    My working definition was always: If it runs Flight Simulator, it's 100% compatible.

  • Jas Strong (unregistered)
    Additionally, he and another researcher rebuilt the FORTRAN-based software from the Vax mainframe in a week and a half using GW Basic (which the computer snobs called "Gee-Wiz Basic")

    That's what GW Basic stands for. No joke.

  • (cs) in reply to Booboo

    WTF? No, FTW!

    np: Smart Systems - Visual Attack (By Any Other Name)

  • bramster (unregistered) in reply to Jas Strong
    Jas Strong:
    Additionally, he and another researcher rebuilt the FORTRAN-based software from the Vax mainframe in a week and a half using GW Basic (which the computer snobs called "Gee-Wiz Basic")

    That's what GW Basic stands for. No joke.

    And here I always thought (really) that it stood for Gates William Basic. . .

    I'm so ashamed. . .

  • Franz Kafka (unregistered) in reply to amischiefr
    amischiefr:
    Code Dependent:
    Ollie Jones:
    Umm, young fellas, those are "foxy" lab assistants. The word "hot" is soooo 90s.
    Anything "female lab assistant" is soooo seventies. Why are the women all relegated to subordinate roles in which their main feature is appearance? What would be really cool is if "Gary" was instead "Mary".

    Oh, wait... this was way back when, wasn't it. Nevermind.

    Because objectifying women is fun? </shrug> What are we supposed to look at, their personalities? Fuck that. Show me some titties!@

    Geez, why can't I notice that my coworker is hot? It isn't objectifying unless that's all I notice.

  • Franz Kafka (unregistered) in reply to webhamster
    webhamster:
    Matthew Watson:
    The Central Laboratory Information Terminal?

    Interesting acronym...

    I once wrote something I called the "Purchase Management System" (totally not noticing the acronym) until the (female) accountant quietly suggested I think about the name...hence the "Purchase & Expense Management System" was born...although the "E" part of the code didn't actually exist until version 2.0.

    IDGI - she missed out on a whole raft of off color jokes: "I'm fighting with the damn PMS again", "Because of the PMS, it takes an hour to buy anything" and so on.

    And yes, it's kind of funny to post this in light of my previous comment.

  • Steve Wahl (unregistered) in reply to operagost
    operagost:
    A "PC compatible" wouldn't have a 3 MHz processor, since the real 8088 and its clones ran at a minimum of 4.77 MHz.
    Just call me mr. pedantic:

    The Sanyo MBC-550 (I had one) ran at 3.6 mhz. I've often thought it was probably the only one running slower than 4.77!

    Nice cheap semi-compatible machine. Peter Norton's book(s), with the suggestion that everyone bypass DOS and write straight to the hardware for speed, really screwed things up for semi-compatibles like this, though. (maybe it wasn't only him, but I still lay the blame there.)

  • Go Army (unregistered)

    While on the subject of acronyms I know a number of US Navy Officers that graduated from the Chesapeake University of Naval Technology...

  • Old VAX hand (unregistered) in reply to Ollie Jones
    Ollie Jones:
    And the VAX text editor was indeed a miserable crock. It was called teco.
    Hey! You could do anything with TECO! There used to be a very good version of Eliza written in TECO.

    I always liked EDT better, though. Come to think of it, I've never liked emacs either.

    There are some bits of the chronology that don't seem to work out, though:

    The earliest IBM PC came out in August 1981, four years after the Apple II series became the first widely popular computer. In its time, the Apple II was ubiquitous in laboratories because of its open architecture. IBM's first 286 machine, the AT, came out three years later. Since there is mention of 286 upgrades here, that would place this story in 1984 at the earliest, when the Apple II had been on the market, in schools, in labs, and heavily advertised, for seven years. It seems improbable that the author of this story could have never seen or heard of the computer or the company at that point. This would also be post-Super Bowl commercial.

    I don't recall anyone referring to even a very early Macintosh by the manufacturer's name; it was always a Macintosh or a Mac. I wasn't directly involved at the time, so I'm not sure if or when Macs replaced Apples in labs, but their lack of expandability (back in the day, there were Apple-compatible cards for almost any possible use) would seem to have discouraged replacing Apple II's with Macs.

    Oh, yeah, and the VAX wasn't a mainframe; it was a supermini. Some of the lesser VAXen were merely PDP-11's on steroids.

    The bit about losing all his data if he lost his connection sounds improbable, as well. Assuming the VAX in question was running VMS, not only did every editor I'm aware of have a perfectly good Save function, to be used early and often when on an unreliable link, but the OS kept infinite numbers of revisions of files. You had to manually purge them, dozens of copies, to get your drive space back. It was really, really hard to lose anything off a VAX. It also made it really easy to hack the sysadmin's account at mumble University, but that's another story entirely.

  • long time ago (unregistered)

    Nobody yet questioned the "VAX mainframe", mainframe ?

    EDT was the default editor, not TECO. Then came EVE which was cool and EDT became an EVE frontend if I remember clearly. EMACS was available on some freeware tapes.

    Computers were networked long before IP made it big. There were a number of products which have long since faded away. If only I could remember their names. BorderNet or something like that, and one that started with an "A1".

  • Jay (unregistered) in reply to Ollie Jones
    Ollie Jones:
    Umm, young fellas, those are "foxy" lab assistants. The word "hot" is soooo 90s.

    And the VAX text editor was indeed a miserable crock. It was called teco.

    TECO didn't mess with no lazy-pants menus. Back then we used real editors, where you were in "text mode" or "command mode", and in command mode, every command was one or two characters, with no frivolous prompts. Like *nix VI, but with way more awesome features.

    Back in my TECO days, a fun game we used to play was to pick a long word at random from the dictionary, and try to guess what would happen if you typed it in as a TECO command string.

    I am reminded of an article I read ... somewhere ... back then that said -- quoting from memory after 30 years -- "Real programmers do not like 'what you see is what you get' editors. Real programmers like editors that are powerful, cryptic, and dangerous. In one word, TECO."

  • (cs) in reply to Old VAX hand
    Old VAX hand:
    Assuming the VAX in question was running VMS, not only did every editor I'm aware of have a perfectly good Save function, to be used early and often when on an unreliable link, but the OS kept infinite numbers of revisions of files.
    sub/infinite/32767/w
  • wosteen (unregistered)

    I'm shocked that no one has mentioned EDLIN yet. OMG! The horrors of editing files with that POS...

    PC-DOS 3.11 FTL :(

  • Worf (unregistered)

    Just FYI - teco is the ancestor to today's... Emacs. (Emacs was originally a collection of macros for teco).

    And people call vi hard to use.

    As for the 3MHz 8088 - it's entirely possible. Intel farmed out production of those CPUs to other companies (I believe they included... Advanced Micro Devices, or AMD? Yes, Intel subcontracted AMD to produce their chips, mostly as a "alternative supplier" exercise).

    I wouldn't be surprised if there were many knockoffs, and if they ran at oddball speeds.

  • Brent Seidel (unregistered) in reply to Ollie Jones
    Ollie Jones:
    Umm, young fellas, those are "foxy" lab assistants. The word "hot" is soooo 90s.

    And the VAX text editor was indeed a miserable crock. It was called teco.

    I used TECO on RSTS/E and RT-11. By the time I got to use VAX/VMS the editors were EDT and TPU. Both were actually quite usable.

  • PG (unregistered) in reply to eric76
    eric76:
    Ollie Jones:
    And the VAX text editor was indeed a miserable crock. It was called teco.
    I used to use Teco on PDP-11's, but I dont' remember ever even seeing it on a VAX.

    I've often wished I had a copy I could use on my OpenBSD machines.

    TECO was "an" editor on VMS, but it was not the "only" editor.

    The standard one was EDT which made a hell of a lot more sense than anything you on *NIX. Then EVE/TPU came out. TECO existed up version 6.X. In fact one of the release notes on VMS 5.0 was that TECO was now compiled as a VAX image, not as a PDP11 compat. mode image.

  • Dr Leather (unregistered)

    The real name for a "gas chromatograph mass selective detector" is a "gas chromatograph/mass spectrometer", GC-MS for short and if he'd called it that, I'm sure he'd have got the attractive lab assistants immediately. Our lab only had the mass spectrometer part and no lab assistants of any sort, so that proves it.

  • (cs) in reply to Kensey
    Kensey:
    Ollie Jones:
    And the VAX text editor was indeed a miserable crock. It was called teco.

    Then again, that miserable crock motivated the creation of what eventually became the OS we know as emacs, which lacks only a decent editor to be useful.

    I'm not sure I would classify emacs as an Operating System. Replace "OS" with, perhaps, "POS", and you have a marvelously sarcastic comment since emacs is, primarily, an editor. ^C^X

  • sewiv (unregistered) in reply to wosteen

    edlin is nice because you can stream input to it, kind of like sed.

    Our "nearly-compatibles" were AT&T 6300s, made by NCR, running Z80s emulating 8086s, IIRC.

  • Dan (unregistered)

    So the compiled FORTRAN code on the VAX was translated into interpreted BASIC for a PC? That seems like several orders of magnitude of decrease in processing power. Was the speed unnecessary?

  • UriGagarin (unregistered) in reply to webhamster

    I work for a Large Japanese company and our subisidiary built a Purchasing system for non inventory items (out of Obsydian ...EEEEK), it was called the Non Inventory Purchase System ... Oddly enough it wasn't called by its acronym ....

  • (cs)
    Re: Damn the River
    I broke you in the canyon...
  • RGB - my real initials (unregistered) in reply to Bob
    Bob:
    Old TOPS-10 Dude:
    Kensey:
    Ollie Jones:
    And the VAX text editor was indeed a miserable crock. It was called teco.

    Then again, that miserable crock motivated the creation of what eventually became the OS we know as emacs, which lacks only a decent editor to be useful.

    I remember TECO. I hated TECO. OTOH, I did like that you could produce useful results in your text buffer by starting TECO and just whacking the crap out of the acoustic coupler. Random line noise made a fine command stream for TECO.

    I remember EVE on VAX boxen, wasn't tooooo bad.

    For those of you who are wondering what a programmable text editor looks like ... The following command means "20 times, search for hist, type from the beginning of the line to the end, move down one line and continue loop". Really useful if you want to see what you will change before you change it.

    [RBY2K]mc teco32 GRP601_UPD_MARK_HISTORY.COB *20<shist$;0ttl>$$ PROGRAM-ID. GRP601_UPD_MARK_HISTORY. *REMARKS. THIS PROGRAM EDITS THE MARK HISTORY FILE.

                              • MODIFICATION HISTORY * * * * * * * * * * * * * * UPDATE THE HISTORY FILE FROM HERE AND RECALCULATE GPA"S MODIFIED MAY 3 82: GRADE IN HIST NOW PACKED BINARY MODIFIED AUG 11 83: ENLARGE HIST REC FROM 1002 TO 1146 MODIFIED 10-Nov-83/BN V(21) Per Dr. Kriege, do not allow history rec ords to be BUILD ALL HISTORY DATA INTO THE NEW (EXPERIMENTAL) LARGE MODIFIED OCT 22 84 V(41): HIST REC FROM 1146 TO 1527 KEEP SUBTOTALS IN HIST RECORD MODIFIED MAR 28 85 V(47): HIST REC 1527 TO 1914, OCCURS 8 TO 10, MODIFIED MAY 21 85 V(50): SET HONORS FLAGS IN HISTORY FILE. MODIFIED SEPT 10 86 V(66): DONT ALLOW SCH 18 OR 19 INTO HIST FILE FOR HISTORICAL PURPOSES ONLY, NO NEW STUFF SELECT HISTORY-FILE ASSIGN TO DSK SELECT HISTORY-COURSE-FILE ASSIGN TO DSK SELECT HISTORY-REPEAT-FILE ASSIGN TO DSK SELECT HISTORY-SEM-TOTALS-FILE ASSIGN TO DSK APPLY LOCK-HOLDING ON HISTORY-FILE, HISTORY-COURSE-FILE, HISTORY-SEM-TOTALS-FILE, GRP-SCH-FILE, GRP-ODT-FILE,
  • (cs)

    Awesome. Inspiring.

  • Bob (unregistered) in reply to tbrown92030
    tbrown92030:
    Kensey:
    Ollie Jones:
    And the VAX text editor was indeed a miserable crock. It was called teco.

    Then again, that miserable crock motivated the creation of what eventually became the OS we know as emacs, which lacks only a decent editor to be useful.

    I'm not sure I would classify emacs as an Operating System. Replace "OS" with, perhaps, "POS", and you have a marvelously sarcastic comment since emacs is, primarily, an editor. ^C^X

    Too bad to quit Emacs you type ^X^C, not ^C^X

  • someone (unregistered) in reply to eric76
    eric76:
    In the late 70s, someone at a certain well-known oil company had two PDP-11's next to each other and was wanting to network them together.

    Someone suggested, not very seriously, that since the tape drives of the two machines were side by side, they could cut a couple small holes in each cabinet, splice a tape to make it continuous, and let it run.

    They never actually did that, of course, but the thought of it has made me laugh whenever I think about it ever since.

    Sounds a bit like the Moebius Tape of Doom to me...

  • Anon (unregistered) in reply to Dr Leather
    Dr Leather:
    The real name for a "gas chromatograph mass selective detector" is a "gas chromatograph/mass spectrometer", GC-MS for short and if he'd called it that, I'm sure he'd have got the attractive lab assistants immediately. Our lab only had the mass spectrometer part and no lab assistants of any sort, so that proves it.

    Nowadays, the ladies really go for GC/MS/MS, but if you really want to get them going, go for MALDI-TOF MS. They'll be putty in your hands.

  • wklink (unregistered) in reply to Walleye
    Walleye:
    "GW Basic (which the computer snobs called "Gee-Wiz Basic")

    The called it that because that's what GW stood for.

    Maybe... or maybe not.

  • CynicalTyler (unregistered) in reply to wklink
    wklink:
    Walleye:
    "GW Basic (which the computer snobs called "Gee-Wiz Basic")

    The called it that because that's what GW stood for.

    Maybe... or maybe not.

    I like the Joel Spolsky bashing. lol

  • A. Peon (unregistered) in reply to Worf
    As for the 3MHz 8088 - it's entirely possible. Intel farmed out production of those CPUs to other companies (I believe they included... Advanced Micro Devices, or AMD? Yes, Intel subcontracted AMD to produce their chips, mostly as a "alternative supplier" exercise).

    At IBM's demand. IBM wanted second sources for all the components in the original (IBM) PC.

  • Dan (unregistered)

    The real WTF is why this is even on TDWTF. I don't want to read something motivating.

  • g4pengts (unregistered) in reply to Franz Kafka
    Franz Kafka:
    webhamster:
    Matthew Watson:
    The Central Laboratory Information Terminal?

    Interesting acronym...

    I once wrote something I called the "Purchase Management System" (totally not noticing the acronym) until the (female) accountant quietly suggested I think about the name...hence the "Purchase & Expense Management System" was born...although the "E" part of the code didn't actually exist until version 2.0.

    IDGI - she missed out on a whole raft of off color jokes: "I'm fighting with the damn PMS again", "Because of the PMS, it takes an hour to buy anything" and so on.

    And yes, it's kind of funny to post this in light of my previous comment.

    In the hospitality industry, there are things called property management systems. And it is abbreviated exactly the way you think it would.

  • Herby (unregistered)

    On editors: Yes, on the VAX you had a variety of editors. I suspect that the choice of which one to use was made by the suitability when running at 300 bps (aka SLOW!). In that environment, TECO is an easier editor to use, as others (EDT for example) need a reasonable speed to be useful. I used EDT on PDP-11's (RSX-11) and at 9600 bps it was pretty good. For PC's there eas EDLIN if you were a glutton for punishment (or just plain ignorant). We got an IBM PC later and found out that someone had written EDT for it. It was bought (this was back in the mid 1980's) and before I left, I snagged a copy. I still have it on my MS-DOS box, and used it just a few minutes ago. It works quite nicely.

    So, 300 bps (via modems) did work, and TECO on hard copy terminals was A solution. Thankfully I never had to deal too much with TECO style editors, but they do exist for a variety of machines. Their biggest attribute is their small memory footprint!

  • Anonymous Lion (unregistered)

    when i was at columbia, the university library's computer system was "columbia library information online". nobody ever seemed to notice the obvious name for a computer dedicated to providing access to it....

  • (cs) in reply to valerion
    valerion:
    CLIT? Pah. The Committe for the Liberation and Integration of Terrifying Organisms and their Rehabilitation Into Society - now there's a real acronym.

    </red dwarf>

    Aren't they the group that provides funding to the pirates we've read about recently? You know, the men in the boats?

  • (cs) in reply to wosteen
    wosteen:
    I'm shocked that no one has mentioned EDLIN yet. OMG! The horrors of editing files with that POS...

    PC-DOS 3.11 FTL :(

    I actually had to edit a large data model for SAS once using only a Decwriter 1200 as a terminal. Not only was this a line-editor, it lacked any sort of screen. It was just a dot-matrix printer with a keyboard and 1200 baud modem.

    As for editors on VAXen, when I freshman was in college, our VAX was running this new thing called "Eunice", which was basically Unix running on top of VMS. So we got to use vi as an editor, but if you wanted to print anything, you had to issue some weird command that tunneled back to VMS to print to the big printer in the computer room. The next year, the VAX was just running Unix.

  • Slackmaster K (unregistered)

    Not to put too fine a point on it, but Laplink supported parallel connections, which sport 115,200 bps of throughput. Serial can only hope to achieve 57,600 bps, and even then only with a 16550A UART, which didn't exist on those old XT's.

    'course, then again, he could have put DOS on there and used Interlnk + Intersrv, which comes with some versions of DOS and only requires a dedicated server. The client would see it as a local drive.

    Man, I miss the 80's. I'm 28.

  • (cs)

    This post so is a wtf. Granted, it's awesome. But if I was told what equipment he had, then walked in and saw that, I'd have eyes like saucers and glance around slowly mumbling ...w ...t ...f. Really impressive; keep these stories in the running!

  • (cs) in reply to KattMan

    This is thedailywtf. No female programmers or techy types exist here and certainly not goth ones - obviously, then, being both, I am a figment of my imagination.

  • Andrew (unregistered)

    Just a question to all of us reading this.

    Discounting the lack or otherwise of resources (including lady lab assistants), are you a Gary, or and Ed.

    I suspect there are a lot more Garys around than Eds, even among readers of The Daily WTF.

  • (cs) in reply to Bob
    Bob:
    KattMan:
    Anon:
    I'm pretty sure that hot lab assistants only exist on CSI.

    Lies! They exist on NCIS also. Oh wait, Abby isn't an assistant is she?

    Abby doesn't fit the criteria in the first place. Forced-adult-goth is more irritating and saddengingly fake than her just being normal.

    These are people that routinely break the best modern commercial grade cryptography in an afternoon. Abbey's gothness is the least of the fakery, but then it's a fictional TV programme and suspension of disbelief is important to its enjoyment.

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