• (cs) in reply to dkf

    I have to agree on the programs. The amount of peek/poke was terrible. But then again, we had whole keywords with press of a single button.

  • Tom_Fan_63 (unregistered) in reply to Erzengel
    Erzengel:
    no:
    real_aardvark:
    "The key thing is not to throw away all the card indexing and original process." He was quite right. I assume he was speaking from experience, around ten years after this little tale. And the sad thing is, almost nobody in the twenty years since has paid the slightest bit of attention to this fairly obvious rule.

    I am now going to bookmark this WTF for the first time ever.

    Brillant!

    Bookmark it? H ave you learned nothing?

    I am going to write down the complete article, URL and associated comments in my TDWTF archive note pad. I might photo copy it for some added redundancy.

    Don't forget to print it out, put it onto a wooden table, take a polaroid, scan it, email it to yourself, print it out, put it in a manila envelope and mail it to timbuktu.

    Hey boy, you're missing the most important step: FAX !!! ;-)

  • Jimbob (unregistered)

    Rock: It will overflow your buffer.

  • Yosh (unregistered)

    Very fitting notice from a newspaper.

    http://halbot.haluze.sk/images/2008-06/4231_idiots.png

  • (cs) in reply to FredSaw
    FredSaw:
    Um... 'scuse me for noticing, but if "things just couldn't be the same", that indicates change.

    Ummm... When you feel like being pedantic enough to correct rock song lyrics, does that mean you're fully qualified to be a dweeb? <g>

    I mean seriously, Fred... GRAMMAR NAZI over the lyrics of Free Bird? I think you need to get a life (or maybe figure out how to make at least a single friend IRL).

    Just sayin'...

  • (cs) in reply to gabba
    gabba:
    I always did hate "Free Bird", I just wasn't sure why.

    And now we know what's wrong with the youth today. ;-)

  • Winslow Theramin (unregistered)

    There needs to be a Snopes.com section just for these made up Daily WTF stories. How many to you think are true? 2%? 5%? I'd say 1 in 50 sounds remotely believable.

  • (cs) in reply to KenW
    KenW:
    I mean seriously, Fred... GRAMMAR NAZI over the lyrics of Free Bird? I think you need to get a life (or maybe figure out how to make at least a single friend IRL).
    Nay, good sir, my lyric pedantry runs deep and has been a prominent part of me all my life. Don't get me started on "Lay, Lady, Lay" (although I suppose "Lie, lady, lie" would be misconstrued). And of course my pedantic brain explodes when I try to wrap it around Zep lyrics.

    In my thoughts I have seen Rings of smoke through the trees, And the voices of those who standing looking.

    I mean... really... you've seen their voices, little Robert Anthony? You've seen... oh, never mind.

    But Rush lyrics are reason enough to be alive (even if Geddy does mispronounce "short-lived" in Natural Science).

    Nevertheless, I don't lack for FIRL. They forgive me the occasional pedantic rant, so rest easy. :)

    Addendum (2008-07-10 10:10): Just a little note here for Robert Plant fans: I saw him and Alison Krause in concert July 7th. It was truly a great show. I tolerate bluegrass (but without the nasal whinings, please), and don't like gospel, but this show was truly great. If you see it, be prepared for a take on "Black Dog" that is as different from the original as was Clapton's remake of "Layla". And their version of "Battle of Evermore" has to be heard to be believed. If you get the chance, by all means see this show.

  • Kris (unregistered)

    at 300 baud, there's a very very very small set of all possible analog waveforms that can be successfully decoded as digital data. if they used BCD for numbers (which was pretty popular at the time), there would be a further amount of invalid data that would be discarded. this definitely couldn't have worked.

  • Also a big geek (unregistered) in reply to valerion
    valerion:
    Also a big geek:
    valerion:
    My ringtone is Free Bird. I guess the computer world has learnt from this lesson because the mobile network doesn't crash everytime someone calls me.

    If your ringtone is Free Bird, I'm guessing your phone doesn't ring very much.

    Do you even get coverage down in mom's basement?

    My phone rings plenty, thanks. And I get excellent coverage in my own house. I'm going to see my parents this weekend so I'll let you know about the basement thing, 'kay?

    Relax, it's just a joke.

    full disclosure: my ringtone is the intro guitar lick from Red vs Blue

  • (cs)

    I guess the worst mistake (by modern standards, as I don't know what coding was back then) was letting database fields overwrite other data. And of course not verifying their backups.

    Then again, I don't really understand why they had to close for a day.

    It seems the cash registers only wrote to a tape and didn't otherwise need the central server. Without inventory report, they wouldn't get refillments, but could sell whatever is in stock.

  • A Gould (unregistered) in reply to Matt
    Matt:
    Jay:
    SomeCoder:
    "I told you to make it idiot proof."

    The problem with trying to make things idiot-proof is that idiots are so creative.

    QFT. Had a teacher like this though as well, learned the most from him and helped me avoid many WTFs later on.

    I as well - my Practical Programming professor was (in)famous for submitting diabolical (but legal) test files.

    e.g. Build a program that reverses the text given as input. He sent it the first twelve pages of the university student manual (a few thousand words) - most programs overflowed long before that. :)

  • Jeff (unregistered) in reply to cowboy_k

    Apparently, you also haven't shot down military fighters with a jet you borrowed from the nearby base in San Andreas with Freebird playing in the background.

  • Frank (unregistered) in reply to Dan

    Hey, I remember recording radio broadcasts that were actually computer programs on a cassette tape and then feeding them back into my Apple IIe. That was mid 80's btw..

  • (cs) in reply to FredSaw
    FredSaw:
    Lynyrd:
    But, if I stayed here with you, girl, Things just couldn't be the same. cause Im as free as a bird now, And this bird you can not change.
    Um... 'scuse me for noticing, but if "things just couldn't be the same", that indicates change.
    cowboy_k:
    (Listening to it now at http://youtube.com/watch?v=O1mCQKuvzCM - not sure I get what the big deal is about it)
    You can't do it like that. To get the full effect, you have to put the top down on your sport coupe, crank up the music, and play it while cruising off down the highway away from a relationship that's grown too clingy.
    Well ... I don't know how to put this to you, Fred.

    I mean, we've had some good times. And a few bad times. And maybe even some 9/16 times.

    But, y'know ... it's that Southron thing. And maybe the fact that I'm a bald, moustachioed, fat, six-foot six and a half Englishman. But mostly the Southron thing.

    You can't be serious. "Freebird?" We have to part.

    I've put the eight-track in the stereo of your 1965 refurbished Mustang. I'll shed a tear for you, whilst humming a rather more apposite Tom Waits song.

    Send me a postcard. Make sure it's not a clingy one.

  • JMO (unregistered) in reply to Dan

    I useta whistle ascii characters at 300 and 1200 baud, no parity. Usually just repeated characters.

  • (cs) in reply to Tom_Fan_63
    Tom_Fan_63:
    Erzengel:
    no:
    real_aardvark:
    "The key thing is not to throw away all the card indexing and original process." He was quite right. I assume he was speaking from experience, around ten years after this little tale. And the sad thing is, almost nobody in the twenty years since has paid the slightest bit of attention to this fairly obvious rule.

    I am now going to bookmark this WTF for the first time ever.

    Brillant!

    Bookmark it? H ave you learned nothing?

    I am going to write down the complete article, URL and associated comments in my TDWTF archive note pad. I might photo copy it for some added redundancy.

    Don't forget to print it out, put it onto a wooden table, take a polaroid, scan it, email it to yourself, print it out, put it in a manila envelope and mail it to timbuktu.

    Hey boy, you're missing the most important step: FAX !!! ;-)

    "boy"?

    But you're quite right, allow me to revise: Don't forget to print it out, put it onto a wooden table, take a polaroid, fax it to yourself, scan the fax, email it to yourself, print it out, put it in a manila envelope, and mail it to timbuktu.

  • (cs) in reply to Also a big geek
    Also a big geek:
    valerion:
    Also a big geek:
    valerion:
    My ringtone is Free Bird. I guess the computer world has learnt from this lesson because the mobile network doesn't crash everytime someone calls me.

    If your ringtone is Free Bird, I'm guessing your phone doesn't ring very much.

    Do you even get coverage down in mom's basement?

    My phone rings plenty, thanks. And I get excellent coverage in my own house. I'm going to see my parents this weekend so I'll let you know about the basement thing, 'kay?

    Relax, it's just a joke.

    full disclosure: my ringtone is the intro guitar lick from Red vs Blue

    Don't know that one - will have to Napster it later.

  • grg (unregistered)

    Sounds really unlikely.

    Cassette tapes were never reliable enough for real business use. They worked fine in the development lab, but in the real world full of dust and crud and salt from the Fritos, the error rate was waay too high.

    Also if this story is true, the cassette format and the comm link had absolutely no protocol, handshaking, blocking, error checking, or error recovery mechanisms. If music could be acccepted at all, they deserve anything that happened to them.

  • OBloodyhell (unregistered) in reply to Dan
    John Wilson:
    TRWTF is that anyone thinks this is actually possible. I'm sorry, but you can't just put a music cassette into a 1970's 300 baud modem, and expect the receiving modem to think it's data. It just cannot happen. Period.

    Protocols, people! They exist for a reason!

    Not back THEN they didn't. Most of that stuff didn't exist as off-the-shelf stuff, me boyo! You wrote it yourself or you did without. And yeah, I guarantee you there were people out there who would be stupid enough to not implement it with suitable verification protocols to make certain that they were getting actual data. Nowadays, you don't find those people outside of Redmond, but back then, they were everywhere.

    Don't assume any computer story, no matter how preposterous sounding, is untrue --

    a) if you can write a military-grade flight sim and let the kangas shoot you down, you can do anything: http://www.gamedev.net/reference/articles/article1176.asp b) Always mount a scratch monkey: This is the funnier, but less accurate version of the story -- read it first: http://www.crainium.net/jdjArchives/2007/09/a_scratch_monkey.html Here's the more accurate one: http://www.ccil.org/jargon/jargon_34.html#TAG1558

  • (cs) in reply to real_aardvark
    real_aardvark:
    You can't be serious. "Freebird?" We have to part.
    Actually it should be "Already Gone".
  • Steve (unregistered)

    I'm a bit suspicious of this one. Several things don't ring true.

    I'm old enough to have actually used audio cassettes, both for audio and for data, and find it difficult to believe that Free Bird or any other piece of music would synch up at all.

    I recall actually putting music cassettes in a data cassette unit just to see what would happen. Invariably, nothing happened. The tape would run but the machine would just ignore it.

  • (cs) in reply to jaded
    jaded:
    John Wilson:
    {bangs head against desk} It {Bang!} Doesn't {Bang!} Work {Bang!} Like {Bang!} That! {Bang!}

    There is no carrier on a music tape! It cannot be transmitted over a V.12/300 baud modem! Can't be done!

    Seriously! Why do you think it was so hard to get a C-64 or a Sinclair ZX-Spectrum to load a data cassette!

    As many other people have mentioned, the "audio" from the tape was not fed into the modem or the phone line.

    The store's manager would tell the system to send the data. The POS server would then dial a modem and establish the connection to the headquarters site. At that time, it would start reading from the cassette and copying the bytes from the cassette drive port to the modem port. There was no packet protocol, just a sign-on exchange followed by a "start receiving data" command sequence, followed by the data, followed by a "stop receiving data" sequence.

    The data was recorded on a cassette tape using FSK. There is no carrier wave involved in FSK: there are simply two different frequencies, one denoting mark and one denoting space. If the audio was even close to a decodable bit, the appropriate 1 or 0 was placed in the buffer. Parity checks were supposed to be used to identify corrupt data, but were not required.

    Of course, this was taking place over an expensive long distance phone call, so protocol was kept to a minimum. It's possible that parity checking would have been turned off to avoid the added expense. Consider that adding a parity bit to each byte would have increased every phone call's duration by about 10 percent.

    By the time I was ever involved with these systems it was at their end of life. My job was on the team writing the replacement system on a then-modern IBM 4680 system.

    I still have the 30-year-old memory card from that first Unitote POS server I decommissioned hanging on my cube wall. It's 16KB of hand-made ferrite core memory, and is a real work of art. I even have a small hand-held microscope available so visitors can see the toroids and the wires threaded through them.

    FSK is still in use, both in the normal, and 4 channel modes. If you have ever carried a pager the numeric and text messages are sent over the air as FSK. There is only basic error correction sent which explained the sometimes random mising or incorr*ct characters that would come out on the display. Extra reading can be found searching on POCSAG and "Schmidt Trigger".

    Normal 2 channel fsk can be heard most places in the US on 454.450 mhz

  • Sasquatch (unregistered)

    The music corrupted the database by filling up the table.

  • spelling nazi (unregistered) in reply to FredSaw

    Alison Krauss. If you're going to hold people to high standards of writing, start with yourself.

  • jaded (unregistered) in reply to Kris

    FSK decoders don't operate on a byte at a time. They decode a single bit at a time, and the decoders are very not-fussy. Human speech over a phone line will decode as random characters with no problems.

    And your statement regarding "there would be a further amount of invalid data that would be discarded" implies that there was error checking on the incoming data. Given the nature of modem communications in that era, I find it extremely easy to believe they simply dumped the raw data into storage, assuming it would parse well enough that they'd go back and manually fix the few errors they found. The modern equivalent of this bug is a buffer overrun in a URL -- you'd think it would be discarded, too, yet here we are 30 years later and we STILL have buffer overruns.

    Picture yourself 30 years from now when someone says: "There's always been error checking in data streams, I'm sure that stuff you're talking about 'SQL injection' attacks couldn't have worked."

  • (cs) in reply to Winslow Theramin
    Winslow Theramin:
    There needs to be a Snopes.com section just for these made up Daily WTF stories. How many to you think are true? 2%? 5%? I'd say 1 in 50 sounds randomly believable.

    FTFY

  • tonecoke (unregistered) in reply to Dan

    dont be so sure... I once mis-dialled a telephone number and got a fax machine. I decided to try and talk to it by making various 'white noise' sounds and managed to get it to acknowledge me (ie it went from the 1-beep-every-3-seconds to a full-on handshake attempt)

  • Indima (unregistered)

    Fun story, but the the real WTF here, is that this site has started to publish decades old urban legends. You heard various stories involving modems and data-casettes on weekly basis if you worked in IT in the 80s and early 90s. There must be thousands of variations of this and similar stories. So, fun story, but if you actually belive it happended, you are truly naive.

  • oscar carserud (unregistered)

    Actualy i did that once at a 2020 vic64 tape memory and was thrilled then i got data output from an electric guitar solo. Garbage ofcourse.

  • oscar carserud (unregistered)

    Actualy i did that once at a 2020 vic64 tape memory and was thrilled then i got data output from an electric guitar solo. Garbage ofcourse.

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