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Windows 3.1 Is Still Alive, And It Just Killed a French Airport
A computer glitch that brought the Paris airport of Orly to a standstill Saturday. Le Canard Enchaîné said in an article the computer failure had affected a system known as DECOR, which is used by air traffic controllers to communicate weather information to pilots. Pilots rely on the system when weather conditions are poor. DECOR, which is used in takeoff and landings, runs on Windows 3.1, an operating system that came onto the market in 1992. (news.vice.com) Más...Sort type: [Top] [Newest]
I miss FORTRAN. First language I learned (besides English, that is). There was always something aesthetically pleasing about a deck of punch cards, until you dropped it.
...or someone switched the position of two of your punch cards somewhere in the middle.
FORTRAN was pretty cool. COBOL was, as said, yucky. PL/1 foreshadowed structured programming and had a unique vector and matrix processing capability. But APL was the nutz ... extreme flexibility in a micro/miniature yet arcane language structure. Imaging inverting a matrix of any size with a one character command!
And COBOL
JCL Flashback!!!!
//SYSIN DD *
//SYSIN DD *
Oh my!!! //SYSIN DD * I think that just caused me PTSD (thinking of Poughkeepsie and writing operating system software in assembler language)
I was in Poughkeepsie, too (1970-1974) but over at the TDC. Started by manually inputting machine code using those front panel switches! PTSD is on the mark!
Kairho, you probably still remember the op code for a "BRANCH CONDITIONAL" instruction. I sure do:Hex"47". We actually were there about the same time. I was transferred to Poughkeepsie around Easter 1970.I remember the data switches on the front panel the same as you...........
I don't remember any opcodes (hooray!) but I do remember dynamically modifying those BC instructions to save space. That's a big no-no these days (criminal, I believe) but quite useful back then. I was at the Homestead in Technology and often consulted with SciComp when they couldn't solve something or needed more computing power, with our tricked out 360/44R and 360/67CP.
I distinctly remember the time I brought down the HASP system (all of it) about a dozen times over 2 days before realizing it always crashed about 10 seconds after I submitted a particular job. And yes, it was a legal //SYSxxx DD card which exposed a really bad READER bug!
I distinctly remember the time I brought down the HASP system (all of it) about a dozen times over 2 days before realizing it always crashed about 10 seconds after I submitted a particular job. And yes, it was a legal //SYSxxx DD card which exposed a really bad READER bug!