plus ca change
Feb. 28th, 2007 05:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
totientA couple of weeks ago I went to a talk by one of the guys who built SABRE, back in 1962. Back in those days, if one of the architects wanted a cherry flavor subroutine instead of vanilla, he called down to a team of programmers in the basement who'd write it for you -- sort of a human Standard Template Library. The guy who was speaking -- one of the very few left from that project -- was one of those, so he didn't have the broad insights. But there were some interesting tidbits, like that the six-digit record locators the airlines still use are that way because 6 uppercase alphanumeric characters will fit into a 36-bit word on an IBM 7090 mainframe.
One thing I'd read and which he corroborated was that the tendency to late hours among hackers in the early days was driven, or maybe just reinforced, by the fact that if you wanted to get any system resources you had to wait until the middle of the night. Nowadays we have tons of system resources, but during the day the codebase here moves so quickly you can't get in a test run between checkins. As a consequence of this, sometimes the tests break. I find myself under the same pressure, 45 years later, as I wait for a checkin to fix the latest broken test so I can get my own change in before tag.
One thing I'd read and which he corroborated was that the tendency to late hours among hackers in the early days was driven, or maybe just reinforced, by the fact that if you wanted to get any system resources you had to wait until the middle of the night. Nowadays we have tons of system resources, but during the day the codebase here moves so quickly you can't get in a test run between checkins. As a consequence of this, sometimes the tests break. I find myself under the same pressure, 45 years later, as I wait for a checkin to fix the latest broken test so I can get my own change in before tag.
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no subject
Date: 2007-03-01 12:30 am (UTC)And on the DECsystem-10 systems where the encoding was called SIXBIT. This explains why DEC-10 systems had 6 characters in the filename (encoded via SIXBIT into one 36-bit word) and a three character extension (encoded into one 18-bit halfword; the other had had flags or protection or something).
Google found this (http://nemesis.lonestar.org/reference/telecom/codes/sixbit.html).
no subject
Date: 2007-03-01 05:40 am (UTC)It was weird when i worked in webMethods Support, being one of only 3 people globally on the support team with mainframe experience.