On 02/09/2019 10:17 PM, wrote:
I am not sure about what happened in the upside down world south of
the equator but we sold the **** out of PCs being used as smart
terminals here in the US. In fact by the early 90s it was getting hard
to find dumb terminals in anything but the places with the simplest
applications with marginally trained workers.

It's been a while since I've seen an ADM-3A or VT100

As a sign of the times, Windows 7 dumped ANSI.sys. We have an elderly
database utility that depended on curses for the interface. I briefly
looked at dragging it into the 21st century before I found DOSBox. The
gamers saved the day, I guess. The utility was a cryptic piece of work
to start with and I doubt many people even remember how to use it. At
the time the VP was fond of it and the hack kept him happy.

When the buzz turned to thin clients, SaaS, and so forth my thought was
'IBM finally won.' The mainframe became AWS and we're back to very
powerful dumb terminals.

I just have painful memories of using a cross-assembler on a PDP-11
hidden in some dark dungeon which was usually being hogged by the
payroll department.

On 2/10/19 2:29 PM, trader_4 wrote:
On Sunday, February 10, 2019 at 1:27:52 PM UTC-5, wrote:
On Sun, 10 Feb 2019 08:13:08 -0800 (PST), trader_4
wrote:

On Sunday, February 10, 2019 at 9:21:55 AM UTC-5, wrote:
On Sun, 10 Feb 2019 05:26:49 -0800 (PST), trader_4
wrote:

On Sunday, February 10, 2019 at 6:21:56 AM UTC-5, Randull L. Stephenson wrote:
On 2/10/19 12:27 AM, Rod Speed wrote:
Nothing to do with corporate Kool Ade that AT&T did an immense
amount of innovation long before they were broken up. You dont
get Nobel Prizes for reducing the cost of running exchanges.


If you are using innovation as your metric, Comcast basically decimated AT&T here. Comcast offers gigabit fiber but AT$T only offers 6Mbps Slowverse.
Want TV from Slowverse? Here, nail this fugly dish up on your roof.


Looks to me like the only innovations at American Telegraph are their deceptive marketing lies.

https://arstechnica.com/information-...-service-5g-e/


Did Comcast invent the transistor? You're confusing buying and deploying
equipment, being faster to deploy new gear, more willing to invest in
infrastructure, with research and innovation.



They didn't invent the transistor so Sony could make little radios you
could hold up to your ear. They were trying to get rid of the half
billion relays in their switching equipment.

Were you there? The phone system also had need for amplifiers, just like
a Sony radio. AT&T invested billions in all kinds of research, without
knowing what it would ultimately be used for. They won a Nobel prize for
trapping atoms with a laser, for example. That's pretty far away from
any immediate business need.

We were talking about innovation that made it's way to the customer.

No, I said that despite being a monopoly, AT&T spent a fortune on research that advanced science and technology, including the invention of the transistor, which speaks for itself. It changed the world. And that most certainly also reached customers, not only at AT&T but everywhere around the world. You can find a transistor today in even the poorest, most backwoods places on the planet. You denied that AT&T's research amounted to anything, that they had any interest in innovation at all.




I'm sure there are some very smart inventive people at AT&T but you probably won't find them in management.

Those who can, do. Those who can't, manage.

On 02/10/2019 06:58 AM, wrote:
The PC Jr was a joke as was the PS/1 and I doubt anyone really cared
much about it. That was at a time when IBM was throwing anything they
could at the wall and hoping it would stick.

I visited a friend that I'd not seen for some time. He worked at IBM
Essex Junction and had a doctorate but he was strictly a hardware guy.
He said he'd finally bought a PC and dragged one of those damn things
out. I gagged.

It's pretty bad when you're upstaged by RatShack/Tandy's 1000.

I'll admit in the '80s I wasn't too sure what Joe Sixpack was going to
do with a PC anyway. They were tools for me and what I was developing
was for industrial or embedded applications. When I bought an Osborne I
it came with SuperCalc and I never figured out what you're supposed to
do with it. 35 years later Excel still is a mystery. People do
impressive things with it but it reminds me of using a screwdriver for a
chisel.

On Sunday, February 10, 2019 at 2:53:26 PM UTC-5, Roger Wilco wrote:
On 2/10/19 2:29 PM, trader_4 wrote:
On Sunday, February 10, 2019 at 1:27:52 PM UTC-5, wrote:
On Sun, 10 Feb 2019 08:13:08 -0800 (PST), trader_4
wrote:

On Sunday, February 10, 2019 at 9:21:55 AM UTC-5, wrote:
On Sun, 10 Feb 2019 05:26:49 -0800 (PST), trader_4
wrote:

On Sunday, February 10, 2019 at 6:21:56 AM UTC-5, Randull L. Stephenson wrote:
On 2/10/19 12:27 AM, Rod Speed wrote:
Nothing to do with corporate Kool Ade that AT&T did an immense
amount of innovation long before they were broken up. You dont
get Nobel Prizes for reducing the cost of running exchanges.


If you are using innovation as your metric, Comcast basically decimated AT&T here. Comcast offers gigabit fiber but AT$T only offers 6Mbps Slowverse.
Want TV from Slowverse? Here, nail this fugly dish up on your roof.


Looks to me like the only innovations at American Telegraph are their deceptive marketing lies.

https://arstechnica.com/information-...-service-5g-e/


Did Comcast invent the transistor? You're confusing buying and deploying
equipment, being faster to deploy new gear, more willing to invest in
infrastructure, with research and innovation.



They didn't invent the transistor so Sony could make little radios you
could hold up to your ear. They were trying to get rid of the half
billion relays in their switching equipment.

Were you there? The phone system also had need for amplifiers, just like
a Sony radio. AT&T invested billions in all kinds of research, without
knowing what it would ultimately be used for. They won a Nobel prize for
trapping atoms with a laser, for example. That's pretty far away from
any immediate business need.

We were talking about innovation that made it's way to the customer.

No, I said that despite being a monopoly, AT&T spent a fortune on research that advanced science and technology, including the invention of the transistor, which speaks for itself. It changed the world. And that most certainly also reached customers, not only at AT&T but everywhere around the world. You can find a transistor today in even the poorest, most backwoods places on the planet. You denied that AT&T's research amounted to anything, that they had any interest in innovation at all.




I'm sure there are some very smart inventive people at AT&T but you probably won't find them in management.

Those who can, do. Those who can't, manage.

Actually, very smart people were in management at Bell Labs, the research and development arm of AT&T. Penzias, the Noble prize winner, headed it at one point. Just because people are smart doesn't mean that they are good managers or are capable of changing a monopoly corporate culture by themselves. AT&T ran basically upside down. There were countless engineering teams developing things, working on ideas, making something, which they would then present to the AT&T product management and marketing people. They would then decide if they should take it to production. It was terribly inefficient and ass backwards. The right way is that product management and marketing understands their customers, their needs, the competition, the market and directs engineering on what to develop. What was amazing was that it went on at Bell Labs/Lucent for two decades after the break-up of AT&T. They just could not shake the old corporate culture that came from being a monopoly. It all went remarkable well for another twenty years. In fact, the world changing around them, actually boosted their business! As the world was moving to the internet, the first step was everyone needed a modem and more phone lines. They were selling 5ESS switches like hot cakes and thought they were geniuses. They didn't realize the consequences of what the internet was bringing and didn't react to it. Circa 2001 it finally caught up with them and they went into reverse and were caught unprepared in a downward spiral.

The old Bell Labs building in Holmdel NJ here used to have 6000 engineers and techs in a beautiful modernistic Eero Saarinen designed 2 mil sq ft building on a 400 acre park like property. It closed after the Lucent bust, redeveloping now into million dollar homes and condos on the property, the building into general office type space, which is still 90% empty. It opened around 1960, the glass mirrored building still looks modern today. At least they had good taste.

On 02/10/2019 05:44 AM, wrote:
That's what our doctor did. My husband (who really likes the guy and
who consumes what seems like a lot of medical services) is joining
the club. I'm finding a new doctor. I can't remember the last time
I had something that needed anything more than a Physician's Assistant.

I've been lucky too. If a NP couldn't handle it the MD would have just
kicked me up to a specialist anyway.

Then there's that. I broke a wedge off the tibia. I could walk although
it was a little painful. After a couple of weeks I decided it wasn't
going to fix itself so I called the orthopedic place for an appointment.
No go, without a physician's referral. So it was off to the doctor's. It
wasn't the first rodeo for us when it came to broken bones so he trusted
my diagnostic abilities, gave me a referral, and a pair of crutches.

On Sun, 10 Feb 2019 12:21:19 -0700, rbowman
wrote:

On 02/10/2019 07:21 AM, wrote:
They didn't invent the transistor so Sony could make little radios you
could hold up to your ear.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regency_TR-1

I can picture a couple of nerds at TI asking themselves what they could
do with those transistor things and one said let's build a little radio.
The major players in the radio business weren't interested.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ward_Christensen

It may be urban legend but the story was Christensen tried to interest
his bosses at IBM in personal computers. Eventually a letter trickled
down from the Gods that said it was nice he had a hobby but PCs were a
fad that wasn't going anywhere. He framed the letter and hung it on his
office wall.

IBM has spawned a lot of things like DRAM, magnetic stripes, and SQL as
well as developing ideas like the ATM and bar codes that have become
universal. I don't know how much they profited from them or if they even
tried.

Sometimes they tried and eventually gave it away. Their VisualAge IDE
was written in SmallTalk and they even bought the company that provided
the SmallTalk compiler. I never used it and it wasn't very popular
because of the way the workspace was structured. It deviated too far
from what programmers were used to. Then they slowly drifted into Java,
with VisualAge morphing into Eclipse. They then handed Eclipse to the
Eclipse Foundation, which is supported by a consortium.

I grew up in upstate NY and IBM Poughkeepsie spun off a lot of small
businesses. It might have been part of the anti-trust paranoia but they
often would set up a supplier and hand the business off.

In the mid-90s IBM laid a lot of people off in the area and that had a
ripple effect. They're still dropping jobs. They're supposed to be
starting a quantum computing center but that's not going to bring back
the good times.


The guy I knew in Kingston where the PC really started (before they
moved it to Boca) told me they were never interested in competing with
the TRS-80. They might be doing something as part of a bigger plan but
he was pretty closed mouthed about what the plan was or really even if
they were working on a PC. Bear in mind Kingston was a big iron water
cooled mainframe operation, like Poughkeepsie.
Dunno, I never sat in a meeting at that level.

On 02/10/2019 10:27 AM, Frank wrote:
Many years ago when we started with the old doctor he was complaining
about not seeing me but having to write referrals for me. Where I
worked, we had a medical facility and staff on site that gave us
complete physical exams every year. I was young and did not need to see
my doctor.

That was my relationship with the last doctor who has retired. Mostly I
went to him for DOT physicals but he was handy for referrals.


Things have changed a lot over the years. The era of the lone gp
working out of his office with just a nurse is practically gone. With
all the big private insurance firms and government health care like
medicare, plus all the burden of government regulations, it takes a big
conglomerate to handle today's environment.

My current doctor works out of a hospital associated center. She
switched hospitals a couple of years ago but I didn't ask why. There are
two hospitals in town and I never understood the relationship. When she
was at Community sometimes she would send me to Providence for blood
work, sometimes not. Maybe they specialize in different things but I
never did enough doctoring to figure it out.

On Sun, 10 Feb 2019 12:34:09 -0700, rbowman
wrote:

On 02/10/2019 06:47 AM, wrote:
I was just referring to the 51xx PC products as opposed to the 85xx
PS/2 products.
I agree it was unfortunate to keep the 51xx model numbers going but I
suspect they thought the General Systems group would be running that
business. It ended up being Industry Systems.

I don't know if they even thought it would be a business. Boca Raton
must have had a bad case of whiplash when the money came and went. Being
an IBMer always was interesting.

I never understood Boca and I wasn't surprised when that moved out. It
ended up in Austin for the most part from what I remember. That was
still another division and I wasn't that involved in the day to day
until the burger joints started using PCs as POS terminals. At that
point I was already in the middle of it because Wendy's had a contract
with the enterprise group on their 3680 systems they had been using
for a decade prior.
Originally I was involved in service delivery, basically figuring out
how to maintain a box that was designed to throw big assemblies at it
when there was no logistic chain to repair them. The parts were too
expensive to just throw away. You are not fixing a printer at the
Wendy's drive through at lunch time and keeping a happy customer.
You aren't keeping a happy bean counter if you throw a $1600 printer
at it.

On Sun, 10 Feb 2019 11:36:47 -0800 (PST), trader_4
wrote:

On Sunday, February 10, 2019 at 1:51:58 PM UTC-5, Ed Pawlowski wrote:
On 2/10/2019 12:43 PM, trader_4 wrote:


The actual history shows that IBM was as perplexed about the nascent
personal computer business and there was no grand scheme. And there was
no x86 business at that point, the PC was introduced not in the business
market, but the personal computing, home market.


Ken Olson, founder and CEO of DEC could not understand why anyone would
want a computer on their desk. The PC made no sense to him. Hopefully,
he tucked away enough money to live on or he'd be waiting tables now.
DEC had facilities all over MA in their prime days.

Ken Olsen and DEC are indeed an interesting case study. Olsen was working at the labs at MIT and realized the need for smaller computers that could be utilized in places like labs and factories, instead of mainframes. He created the minicomputer business, which IBM, DG, Burroughs, etc ignored. He got inside their time and product cycles, out maneuvered them, and built DEC into a Fortune 500 company. That was the 60s and 70s. DEC ruled the roost and appeared invincible. Then the PC came along and the same thing happened to DEC and Ken Olsen that he had done to the mainframe companies. DEC missed the PC, blew it, and it tore into their business. Compaq wound up buying them when they had already fallen badly and couldn't get back up. That was a mistake. But despite the humiliation, I'm sure Olsen had plenty of money and didn't suffer. He was one of those guys who wore off the rack suits, worked 80 hours a week, rarely took vacation, drove an ordinary car. Similar to guys
like Andy Grove, Gordon Moore, Bob Noyce, and Warren Buffet.

DEC never really competed with the enterprise group but they nipped
into the general system's patch. IBM took a couple of meaningless
swings at them but I think they decided the PDP people were not going
to budge. It was an entirely different culture with different goals.

On Sun, 10 Feb 2019 12:51:33 -0700, rbowman
wrote:

On 02/09/2019 10:17 PM, wrote:
I am not sure about what happened in the upside down world south of
the equator but we sold the **** out of PCs being used as smart
terminals here in the US. In fact by the early 90s it was getting hard
to find dumb terminals in anything but the places with the simplest
applications with marginally trained workers.

It's been a while since I've seen an ADM-3A or VT100

As a sign of the times, Windows 7 dumped ANSI.sys. We have an elderly
database utility that depended on curses for the interface. I briefly
looked at dragging it into the 21st century before I found DOSBox. The
gamers saved the day, I guess. The utility was a cryptic piece of work
to start with and I doubt many people even remember how to use it. At
the time the VP was fond of it and the hack kept him happy.

When the buzz turned to thin clients, SaaS, and so forth my thought was
'IBM finally won.' The mainframe became AWS and we're back to very
powerful dumb terminals.

I just have painful memories of using a cross-assembler on a PDP-11
hidden in some dark dungeon which was usually being hogged by the
payroll department.

I am still running dBase 4 in DOSBOX on this machine. It works great.
I have had mixed results with ANSI.SYS though since W/98 went away.

On Sun, 10 Feb 2019 13:08:22 -0700, rbowman
wrote:

On 02/10/2019 06:58 AM, wrote:
The PC Jr was a joke as was the PS/1 and I doubt anyone really cared
much about it. That was at a time when IBM was throwing anything they
could at the wall and hoping it would stick.

I visited a friend that I'd not seen for some time. He worked at IBM
Essex Junction and had a doctorate but he was strictly a hardware guy.
He said he'd finally bought a PC and dragged one of those damn things
out. I gagged.

It's pretty bad when you're upstaged by RatShack/Tandy's 1000.

I'll admit in the '80s I wasn't too sure what Joe Sixpack was going to
do with a PC anyway. They were tools for me and what I was developing
was for industrial or embedded applications. When I bought an Osborne I
it came with SuperCalc and I never figured out what you're supposed to
do with it. 35 years later Excel still is a mystery. People do
impressive things with it but it reminds me of using a screwdriver for a
chisel.

I was pretty much just using my PC-1 (First day ship 5150)
as a word processor and some very rudimentary games and later a
Prodigy terminal until someone gave me dBase 3 and I found the
language book. At that point I became productive.

On 2/10/2019 3:08 PM, rbowman wrote:


I'll admit in the '80s I wasn't too sure what Joe Sixpack was going to
do with a PC anyway. They were tools for me and what I was developing
was for industrial or embedded applications. When I bought an Osborne I
it came with SuperCalc and I never figured out what you're supposed to
do with it. 35 years later Excel still is a mystery. People do
impressive things with it but it reminds me of using a screwdriver for a
chisel.


The PC has many uses. For instance. instead of a $10 timer, you can use
a $2000 PC to turn a light on and off.

Excel has many uses too. You can track your utility bills every month
and eliminate the need for a pencil that has to be sharpened on occasion.

I do use Quicken though. It really does make banking easier and more
accurate than the old checkbook.

-

"Roger Wilco" wrote in message
...
On 2/10/19 2:29 PM, trader_4 wrote:
On Sunday, February 10, 2019 at 1:27:52 PM UTC-5, wrote:
On Sun, 10 Feb 2019 08:13:08 -0800 (PST), trader_4
wrote:

On Sunday, February 10, 2019 at 9:21:55 AM UTC-5,
wrote:
On Sun, 10 Feb 2019 05:26:49 -0800 (PST), trader_4
wrote:

On Sunday, February 10, 2019 at 6:21:56 AM UTC-5, Randull L.
Stephenson wrote:
On 2/10/19 12:27 AM, Rod Speed wrote:
Nothing to do with corporate Kool Ade that AT&T did an immense
amount of innovation long before they were broken up. You dont
get Nobel Prizes for reducing the cost of running exchanges.


If you are using innovation as your metric, Comcast basically
decimated AT&T here. Comcast offers gigabit fiber but AT$T only
offers 6Mbps Slowverse.
Want TV from Slowverse? Here, nail this fugly dish up on your roof.


Looks to me like the only innovations at American Telegraph are
their deceptive marketing lies.

https://arstechnica.com/information-...-service-5g-e/


Did Comcast invent the transistor? You're confusing buying and
deploying
equipment, being faster to deploy new gear, more willing to invest in
infrastructure, with research and innovation.



They didn't invent the transistor so Sony could make little radios you
could hold up to your ear. They were trying to get rid of the half
billion relays in their switching equipment.

Were you there? The phone system also had need for amplifiers, just
like
a Sony radio. AT&T invested billions in all kinds of research, without
knowing what it would ultimately be used for. They won a Nobel prize
for
trapping atoms with a laser, for example. That's pretty far away from
any immediate business need.

We were talking about innovation that made it's way to the customer.

No, I said that despite being a monopoly, AT&T spent a fortune on
research that advanced science and technology, including the invention of
the transistor, which speaks for itself. It changed the world. And that
most certainly also reached customers, not only at AT&T but everywhere
around the world. You can find a transistor today in even the poorest,
most backwoods places on the planet. You denied that AT&T's research
amounted to anything, that they had any interest in innovation at all.




I'm sure there are some very smart inventive people at AT&T but you
probably won't find them in management.

Those who can, do. Those who can't, manage.

Why didnt you change the subject line ?

On 2/10/2019 3:17 PM, trader_4 wrote:
The old Bell Labs building in Holmdel NJ here used to have 6000 engineers and techs in a beautiful modernistic Eero Saarinen designed 2 mil sq ft building on a 400 acre park like property. It closed after the Lucent bust, redeveloping now into million dollar homes and condos on the property, the building into general office type space, which is still 90% empty. It opened around 1960, the glass mirrored building still looks modern today. At least they had good taste.

Â*Bell Telegraph Company should have spent less on extravagant real estate and more on deploying fiber optic cable to their customers.

On 2/10/2019 3:34 PM, rbowman wrote:
On 02/10/2019 10:27 AM, Frank wrote:
Many years ago when we started with the old doctor he was complaining
about not seeing me but having to write referrals for me.Â* Where I
worked, we had a medical facility and staff on site that gave us
complete physical exams every year.Â* I was young and did not need to see
my doctor.

That was my relationship with the last doctor who has retired. Mostly I
went to him for DOT physicals but he was handy for referrals.


Things have changed a lot over the years.Â* The era of the lone gp
working out of his office with just a nurse is practically gone.Â* With
all the big private insurance firms and government health care like
medicare, plus all the burden of government regulations, it takes a big
conglomerate to handle today's environment.

My current doctor works out of a hospital associated center. She
switched hospitals a couple of years ago but I didn't ask why. There are
two hospitals in town and I never understood the relationship. When she
was at Community sometimes she would send me to Providence for blood
work, sometimes not. Maybe they specialize in different things but I
never did enough doctoring to figure it out.

The old doctors office told me that 40% of his income was derived from
hospital privileges and when he lost that he was hurting. There are a
couple of hospitals here but this was the huge one that dominates and my
new doctor is associated with them as part of their practice. She's in
a satellite office 15 minutes away with a couple other doctors and can
even get blood tests there. I don't because they charge an extra fee
and I can save it by going into the hospital for the test or other wheres.

On 02/10/2019 11:51 AM, Ed Pawlowski wrote:
Ken Olson, founder and CEO of DEC could not understand why anyone would
want a computer on their desk. The PC made no sense to him. Hopefully,
he tucked away enough money to live on or he'd be waiting tables now.
DEC had facilities all over MA in their prime days.

They made it further than MA. We subcontracted cable assembly from their
Augusta, ME facility. Eventually they decided the right thing to do was
to give the contract to the Passamaquoddys. That went as well as could
be expected. It wasn't a big part of our business and I didn't miss the
boring drive up from Sanford at all.

DEC's run at the PC market with the Rainbow 100 was interesting. The
initial scheme of having a proprietary format for the floppies to force
you to buy expensive media from DEC turned a lot of people off. Even
when they got around to MSDOS they assumed people would always use the
DOS API. Peter Norton's first book showed everyone how to sneak around
DOS very nicely. Subvert the 8253 PIT and you could make pleasing
machine gun and falling bomb noises with the speaker. Don't like the 55
msec tick when it rolls over? Speed that puppy up and hook the interrupt
so you still could handle the stuff that expected 55 msecs. Build a
not-quite-compatible piece of hardware that didn't support all the hacks
people were doing to get around the limitations of DOS? Not a good idea.

DEC's spinoff, Data General, is also a good lesson. They almost snatched
victory when the Motorola effect caught up with them. 88000? We were
only fooling. Ford really likes the PowerPC and they'll buy a zillion
parts so we're going to do that instead.

Their DG-1 was another almost-a-great-idea.

On 02/10/2019 01:47 PM, wrote:
DEC never really competed with the enterprise group but they nipped
into the general system's patch. IBM took a couple of meaningless
swings at them but I think they decided the PDP people were not going
to budge. It was an entirely different culture with different goals.

https://www.netjeff.com/humor/item.cgi?file=VaxVs3090

Kind of a funny tale about a poor little VAX that went to live with the
3090's...

On 02/10/2019 01:33 PM, wrote:
The guy I knew in Kingston where the PC really started (before they
moved it to Boca) told me they were never interested in competing with
the TRS-80. They might be doing something as part of a bigger plan but
he was pretty closed mouthed about what the plan was or really even if
they were working on a PC. Bear in mind Kingston was a big iron water
cooled mainframe operation, like Poughkeepsie.
Dunno, I never sat in a meeting at that level.

I went to school in Troy and IBM had a heavy presence. My first brush
with computers was on a 360/30 and they also sponsored work/study or
internships for hardware people. When I graduated I interviewed at
Endicott but nothing came of it. Being 1A didn't help. I left the area
in '72 and the whole east coast in '88 so I missed the implosion of
Poughkeepsie, Kingston, Endicott, and the other major centers. Essex
Junction got hit too as it morphed into GlobalFoundaries.

My cousin worked at IBM Burlington during the expansion days. IBM needed
space and bought a store. I forget if it was a grocery or department
store but it didn't say IBM on the front in big letters. She'd be
working along when someone that hadn't gotten the message would wander
in looking for a head of lettuce or something.

I know the feeling. The building where I presently work is completely
unmarked but many of the state offices and the VA are down the street so
we get lost souls wandering in looking for DMV or the VA. As long as the
guys from Dominos or Jimmy John's can find us.

On 02/10/2019 01:43 PM, wrote:
Originally I was involved in service delivery, basically figuring out
how to maintain a box that was designed to throw big assemblies at it
when there was no logistic chain to repair them. The parts were too
expensive to just throw away. You are not fixing a printer at the
Wendy's drive through at lunch time and keeping a happy customer.
You aren't keeping a happy bean counter if you throw a $1600 printer
at it.

Fixing a printer at Wendy's would be fun. At one place where I worked if
you called in the IBM CE you first had to take the ribbons out of all
the printers. You never knew what Russkie spies might have been able to
decipher from ribbon strikes.

In retrospect we could have given the Soviets the source code and set
them back 10 years. That was my first and last DoD project and I fully
understand why the F-35 doesn't fly too well. (the project had to do
with another flying weapons platform, not the F-35).

On 02/10/2019 01:49 PM, wrote:
I am still running dBase 4 in DOSBOX on this machine. It works great.
I have had mixed results with ANSI.SYS though since W/98 went away.


We use db_VISTA from about the same era. It's primitive, it's ugly to
work with, and it's fast.

I sort of use dBASE IV. ESRI shapefiles use the dbf file to store the
attributes of the geometries. However dBASE IV is as spatial aware as a
toaster so they extended it with shx and shp files.

The shape geometries are variable length records but the shx has fixed
length entries after the 100 byte header. So, if the 98th record in the
dbf has the range, prefix, name and type for 100 E MAIN ST, you seek to
the 98th entry in the shx file, which then gives you the file offset to
the actual geometry for that segment of E MAIN ST. Elegant it ain't...

ESRI also cooked up schemes to store GIS data in mdb (Access), SQL
Server, and their own FileGDB formats. Fortunately the ArcObjects API
works the same for all of them once you select the data source.

Unfortunately, the choices they made back in the dBASE days colored the
subsequent designs and you get a lot of data redundancy.

On 02/10/2019 12:53 PM, Roger Wilco wrote:
I'm sure there are some very smart inventive people at AT&T but you
probably won't find them in management.

Those who can, do. Those who can't, manage.

You really need smart people in both areas to succeed. Smart, inventive
techies tend to go off on tangents because the tangent is fun and
interesting. You need managers to set the goal and make sure everyone is
working toward it.

That applies to life in general. Capable people without leadership tend
to mill around. The problem is competent leaders are hard to find.

"rbowman" wrote in message
...
On 02/10/2019 12:53 PM, Roger Wilco wrote:
I'm sure there are some very smart inventive people at AT&T but you
probably won't find them in management.

Those who can, do. Those who can't, manage.

You really need smart people in both areas to succeed. Smart, inventive
techies tend to go off on tangents because the tangent is fun and
interesting. You need managers to set the goal and make sure everyone is
working toward it.

That applies to life in general. Capable people without leadership tend to
mill around. The problem is competent leaders are hard to find.

And not easy to get plenty of those to do that sort of work
instead of doing what interests them at the coal face either.

On 02/10/2019 01:57 PM, wrote:
I was pretty much just using my PC-1 (First day ship 5150)
as a word processor and some very rudimentary games and later a
Prodigy terminal until someone gave me dBase 3 and I found the
language book. At that point I became productive.


I've never had much use for a word processor. Unlike the famous line
from 'Quigley Down Under' just because I don't have use for one doesn't
mean I can use one either. Word or LibreOffice and I have a long,
unfriendly history. If I can't do it in gVim is doesn't get done.

That said, WordStar was bundled with the Osborne I so I used it as a
programming editor. When I finally transitioned to a PC, I bought Brief.
Borland bought and killed it but it's still around as Brief
compatibility in other editors.

I've never had a personal use for a database. I've worked with most of
them, DB2, SQL Server, PostGres, MySQL, MongoDB, and so forth but I've
never had the urge to create a database of my books, cd's, or whatever.

On 02/10/2019 02:18 PM, Ed Pawlowski wrote:

I do use Quicken though. It really does make banking easier and more
accurate than the old checkbook.

I don't recall ever balancing a checkbook in my life... I put money in,
I write checks, they don't bounce, end of story. Most recurring charges
are on autopay so I don't even write that many checks anymore. I keep
the CostCo credit card on paper since the bill comes at the end of the
month and I use it to jog my memory if there's anything else I should be
paying.

My banking used to happen this time of the year when I'd stop by to do
an IRA contribution but I can't even do that anymore.

The power company includes the monthly usage summary for the last year
with every bill. This winter was better than last winter but this
frigging month is going to put paid to that. I was going to take a walk
in the woods this afternoon, started the car, warmed it up, and made it
a mile and a half before saying 'Screw this! It's 6 degrees out there.'
and turning around. I'm getting pussified in my old age.

"rbowman" wrote in message
...
On 02/10/2019 02:18 PM, Ed Pawlowski wrote:

I do use Quicken though. It really does make banking easier and more
accurate than the old checkbook.

I don't recall ever balancing a checkbook in my life... I put money in, I
write checks, they don't bounce, end of story. Most recurring charges are
on autopay so I don't even write that many checks anymore. I keep the
CostCo credit card on paper since the bill comes at the end of the month
and I use it to jog my memory if there's anything else I should be paying.

I get mine automatically paid off in full at the end of the month from the
account
that pays the best interest rate on my considerable savings that I can find.

My banking used to happen this time of the year when I'd stop by to do an
IRA contribution but I can't even do that anymore.

The power company includes the monthly usage summary for the last year
with every bill. This winter was better than last winter but this frigging
month is going to put paid to that. I was going to take a walk in the
woods this afternoon, started the car, warmed it up, and made it a mile
and a half before saying 'Screw this! It's 6 degrees out there.' and
turning around. I'm getting pussified in my old age.

In article ,
says...

That's what our doctor did. My husband (who really likes the guy and
who consumes what seems like a lot of medical services) is joining
the club. I'm finding a new doctor. I can't remember the last time
I had something that needed anything more than a Physician's Assistant.




Probably 70 % of the ailments could be cured if you could just go to the
drug store and get them without having to see a doctor.

Every year ot two my wife gets a sinus infection. Same medicine every
time. If it was not a perscription required , we could just go to the
store and get the same thing.

On Sun, 10 Feb 2019 16:18:57 -0500, Ed Pawlowski wrote:

On 2/10/2019 3:08 PM, rbowman wrote:


I'll admit in the '80s I wasn't too sure what Joe Sixpack was going to
do with a PC anyway. They were tools for me and what I was developing
was for industrial or embedded applications. When I bought an Osborne I
it came with SuperCalc and I never figured out what you're supposed to
do with it. 35 years later Excel still is a mystery. People do
impressive things with it but it reminds me of using a screwdriver for a
chisel.


The PC has many uses. For instance. instead of a $10 timer, you can use
a $2000 PC to turn a light on and off.

Excel has many uses too. You can track your utility bills every month
and eliminate the need for a pencil that has to be sharpened on occasion.

I do use Quicken though. It really does make banking easier and more
accurate than the old checkbook.

My main contact with excel is the data I get on water quality from
DEP.
It is OK if all you want to do is re sort columns and such but if I
really want to crunch numbers I still export it as a CSV, stuff it
into a dBase file and write a script. I assume I could do that with
Excel but this dog is too old too learn a new trick for the little I
need it.

On Sun, 10 Feb 2019 17:11:35 -0700, rbowman
wrote:

On 02/10/2019 01:47 PM, wrote:
DEC never really competed with the enterprise group but they nipped
into the general system's patch. IBM took a couple of meaningless
swings at them but I think they decided the PDP people were not going
to budge. It was an entirely different culture with different goals.

https://www.netjeff.com/humor/item.cgi?file=VaxVs3090

Kind of a funny tale about a poor little VAX that went to live with the
3090's...



Halon dumps are pretty exciting. I have been in one and stopped 2
more. They are right. 30 pound floor tiles are sailing around like
frisbees, thousand pound frames move and all that trash and dirt
people have been sweeping under the floor for the last 5 years becomes
airborne.
The whole computer room needs a good scrubbing and every filter in the
place needs to be replaced if the system stayed up.

On Sun, 10 Feb 2019 17:35:45 -0700, rbowman
wrote:

On 02/10/2019 01:33 PM, wrote:
The guy I knew in Kingston where the PC really started (before they
moved it to Boca) told me they were never interested in competing with
the TRS-80. They might be doing something as part of a bigger plan but
he was pretty closed mouthed about what the plan was or really even if
they were working on a PC. Bear in mind Kingston was a big iron water
cooled mainframe operation, like Poughkeepsie.
Dunno, I never sat in a meeting at that level.

I went to school in Troy and IBM had a heavy presence. My first brush
with computers was on a 360/30 and they also sponsored work/study or
internships for hardware people. When I graduated I interviewed at
Endicott but nothing came of it. Being 1A didn't help. I left the area
in '72 and the whole east coast in '88 so I missed the implosion of
Poughkeepsie, Kingston, Endicott, and the other major centers. Essex
Junction got hit too as it morphed into GlobalFoundaries.

My cousin worked at IBM Burlington during the expansion days. IBM needed
space and bought a store. I forget if it was a grocery or department
store but it didn't say IBM on the front in big letters. She'd be
working along when someone that hadn't gotten the message would wander
in looking for a head of lettuce or something.

I know the feeling. The building where I presently work is completely
unmarked but many of the state offices and the VA are down the street so
we get lost souls wandering in looking for DMV or the VA. As long as the
guys from Dominos or Jimmy John's can find us.

When I was working in the 4341 support center in "Endicott", we were
really in an abandoned grocery store across the river (Vestal). It was
a strange place to work. I got out of there as fast as I could.

On Sun, 10 Feb 2019 17:46:52 -0700, rbowman
wrote:

On 02/10/2019 01:43 PM, wrote:
Originally I was involved in service delivery, basically figuring out
how to maintain a box that was designed to throw big assemblies at it
when there was no logistic chain to repair them. The parts were too
expensive to just throw away. You are not fixing a printer at the
Wendy's drive through at lunch time and keeping a happy customer.
You aren't keeping a happy bean counter if you throw a $1600 printer
at it.

Fixing a printer at Wendy's would be fun. At one place where I worked if
you called in the IBM CE you first had to take the ribbons out of all
the printers. You never knew what Russkie spies might have been able to
decipher from ribbon strikes.

In retrospect we could have given the Soviets the source code and set
them back 10 years. That was my first and last DoD project and I fully
understand why the F-35 doesn't fly too well. (the project had to do
with another flying weapons platform, not the F-35).


Working in DC we had lots of places like that. In NSA you get your own
personal marine who is never more than 3 feet from you carrying a .45
in condition 1.

On Sun, 10 Feb 2019 18:49:41 -0700, rbowman
wrote:

On 02/10/2019 01:57 PM, wrote:
I was pretty much just using my PC-1 (First day ship 5150)
as a word processor and some very rudimentary games and later a
Prodigy terminal until someone gave me dBase 3 and I found the
language book. At that point I became productive.


I've never had much use for a word processor. Unlike the famous line
from 'Quigley Down Under' just because I don't have use for one doesn't
mean I can use one either. Word or LibreOffice and I have a long,
unfriendly history. If I can't do it in gVim is doesn't get done.

That said, WordStar was bundled with the Osborne I so I used it as a
programming editor. When I finally transitioned to a PC, I bought Brief.
Borland bought and killed it but it's still around as Brief
compatibility in other editors.

I've never had a personal use for a database. I've worked with most of
them, DB2, SQL Server, PostGres, MySQL, MongoDB, and so forth but I've
never had the urge to create a database of my books, cd's, or whatever.

IBM had a very powerful text editor that was my word processor (CE3).
There are still things you can do with it that you can't do with any
Windoze product I have seen. They all seem to be row oriented and CE3
let you work with columns. That is handy if you are working with
indexes or lists. You can pick up a column and drop it somewhere else
without bothering the rest of the stuff on that row. (add or delete
rows etc)
Word pad is fine for about 99% of anything I am writing although I
still edit HTML with Notepad sometime

On 2/10/19 10:35 PM, Ralph Mowery wrote:
In article ,
says...

That's what our doctor did. My husband (who really likes the guy and
who consumes what seems like a lot of medical services) is joining
the club. I'm finding a new doctor. I can't remember the last time
I had something that needed anything more than a Physician's Assistant.




Probably 70 % of the ailments could be cured if you could just go to the
drug store and get them without having to see a doctor.

Every year ot two my wife gets a sinus infection. Same medicine every
time. If it was not a perscription required , we could just go to the
store and get the same thing.




Doctors are the required safeguards that prevent the misuse of antibiotics and opioids.
/sarcasm

On 2/10/19 8:18 PM, rbowman wrote:
On 02/10/2019 12:53 PM, Roger Wilco wrote:
I'm sure there are some very smart inventive people at AT&T but you
probably won't find them in management.

Those who can, do.Â* Those who can't, manage.

You really need smart people in both areas to succeed. Smart, inventive techies tend to go off on tangents because the tangent is fun and interesting. You need managers to set the goal and make sure everyone is working toward it.

That applies to life in general. Capable people without leadership tend to mill around. The problem is competent leaders are hard to find.


Smart, inventive techies do the work. Managers take the credit. CEOs take the cash.

On Sunday, February 10, 2019 at 2:50:06 PM UTC-5, rbowman wrote:
On 02/09/2019 10:17 PM, wrote:
I am not sure about what happened in the upside down world south of
the equator but we sold the **** out of PCs being used as smart
terminals here in the US. In fact by the early 90s it was getting hard
to find dumb terminals in anything but the places with the simplest
applications with marginally trained workers.

It's been a while since I've seen an ADM-3A or VT100

We had a VT100 lying around until just a few years ago, when our COO went
on a cleaning binge.

We had VT220s and VT320s being used until 1999 for our ERP system, when
they switched to a PC-based application. And we're still using that
1999 software. *sigh*

Cindy Hamilton

On Sunday, February 10, 2019 at 3:06:53 PM UTC-5, rbowman wrote:
On 02/10/2019 06:58 AM, wrote:
The PC Jr was a joke as was the PS/1 and I doubt anyone really cared
much about it. That was at a time when IBM was throwing anything they
could at the wall and hoping it would stick.

I visited a friend that I'd not seen for some time. He worked at IBM
Essex Junction and had a doctorate but he was strictly a hardware guy.
He said he'd finally bought a PC and dragged one of those damn things
out. I gagged.

It's pretty bad when you're upstaged by RatShack/Tandy's 1000.

I'll admit in the '80s I wasn't too sure what Joe Sixpack was going to
do with a PC anyway. They were tools for me and what I was developing
was for industrial or embedded applications. When I bought an Osborne I
it came with SuperCalc and I never figured out what you're supposed to
do with it. 35 years later Excel still is a mystery. People do
impressive things with it but it reminds me of using a screwdriver for a
chisel.

I use it as a sortable table. If I want to do calculations, I write a
C program.

Cindy Hamilton

On 2/11/2019 1:51 AM, wrote:
On Sun, 10 Feb 2019 16:18:57 -0500, Ed Pawlowski wrote:

On 2/10/2019 3:08 PM, rbowman wrote:


I'll admit in the '80s I wasn't too sure what Joe Sixpack was going to
do with a PC anyway. They were tools for me and what I was developing
was for industrial or embedded applications. When I bought an Osborne I
it came with SuperCalc and I never figured out what you're supposed to
do with it. 35 years later Excel still is a mystery. People do
impressive things with it but it reminds me of using a screwdriver for a
chisel.


The PC has many uses. For instance. instead of a $10 timer, you can use
a $2000 PC to turn a light on and off.

Excel has many uses too. You can track your utility bills every month
and eliminate the need for a pencil that has to be sharpened on occasion.

I do use Quicken though. It really does make banking easier and more
accurate than the old checkbook.

My main contact with excel is the data I get on water quality from
DEP.
It is OK if all you want to do is re sort columns and such but if I
really want to crunch numbers I still export it as a CSV, stuff it
into a dBase file and write a script. I assume I could do that with
Excel but this dog is too old too learn a new trick for the little I
need it.

At work I used Excel quite a bit. With a macro it was easy to do
production reports, inventory changes, and the like.

At home, I only had one practical use. About 9 years ago I had a new,
higher efficiency boiler installed. The idea was the savings would pay
for it over time. I tracked oil use and degree days for two years with
the old boiler, then started tracking the new one. I used the same
weather station for degree days. In seven years, the cost of the boiler
was saved, then I started to come ahead. Then we sold the house anyway
so the new owner gets the majority of benefits.

On 02/11/2019 04:34 AM, wrote:
We had VT220s and VT320s being used until 1999 for our ERP system, when
they switched to a PC-based application. And we're still using that
1999 software. *sigh*

Don't knock it -- I'm still fixing 1999 software. I did an interface to
the state for a site in Illinois. The state is still using the IBM
network protocol and speaking in EBCDIC. Another site used DECNet but
that one is long gone fortunately. The contract was weak so they
basically got anything their little hearts desired for free.

Then there is Windows. No matter how much lipstick they put on the pig a
lot of the calls trickle down to the old NT API hidden in the basement.

On Monday, February 11, 2019 at 9:50:04 AM UTC-5, rbowman wrote:
On 02/11/2019 04:34 AM, wrote:
We had VT220s and VT320s being used until 1999 for our ERP system, when
they switched to a PC-based application. And we're still using that
1999 software. *sigh*

Don't knock it -- I'm still fixing 1999 software.

I'd be happier if it had been good in 1999. It's got a grid
layout. You can't resize the columns. You can't sort by various
columns.

Of course, if we'd paid for maintenance, we could be using their
2019 software. But at some point our CFO decided he'd rather
keep the paychecks going than the software maintenance. I find
it difficult to argue with that, even though the maintenance
paid by our customers has kept us alive through lean years.

I did an interface to
the state for a site in Illinois. The state is still using the IBM
network protocol and speaking in EBCDIC. Another site used DECNet but
that one is long gone fortunately. The contract was weak so they
basically got anything their little hearts desired for free.

Quite a bit of the source code our current product uses was
written in 1990-1992. It was well designed and skillfully
implemented, and we've never needed to fix any bugs in quite
large sections of the code.

It's funny. I used to hate VAX/VMS. Now I hate Windows. I
guess I'm just a hater.

Cindy Hamilton

On 2/11/2019 9:43 AM, Ed Pawlowski wrote:
On 2/11/2019 1:51 AM, wrote:
On Sun, 10 Feb 2019 16:18:57 -0500, Ed Pawlowski wrote:

On 2/10/2019 3:08 PM, rbowman wrote:


I'll admit in the '80s I wasn't too sure what Joe Sixpack was going to
do with a PC anyway. They were tools for me and what I was developing
was for industrial or embedded applications. When I bought an Osborne I
it came with SuperCalc and I never figured out what you're supposed to
do with it. 35 years later Excel still is a mystery. People do
impressive things with it but it reminds me of using a screwdriver for a
chisel.


The PC has many uses.Â* For instance. instead of a $10 timer, you can use
a $2000 PC to turn a light on and off.

Excel has many uses too.Â* You can track your utility bills every month
and eliminate the need for a pencil that has to be sharpened on occasion.

I do use Quicken though.Â* It really does make banking easier and more
accurate than the old checkbook.

My main contact with excel is the data I get on water quality from
DEP.
It is OK if all you want to do is re sort columns and such but if I
really want to crunch numbers I still export it as a CSV, stuff it
into a dBase file and write a script. I assume I could do that with
Excel but this dog is too old too learn a new trick for the little I
need it.

At work I used Excel quite a bit.Â* With a macro it was easy to do production reports, inventory changes, and the like.

At home, I only had one practical use.Â* About 9 years ago I had a new, higher efficiency boiler installed.Â* The idea was the savings would pay for it over time.Â* I tracked oil use and degree days for two years with the old boiler, then started tracking
the new one. I used the same weather station for degree days.Â* In seven years, the cost of the boiler was saved, then I started to come ahead. Then we sold the house anyway so the new owner gets the majority of benefits.


Seldom use a spreadsheet but recently used LibreOffice Calc to create a label for my entrance panel breakers.Â* Setting the exact row height and column width of the cells made layout a snap.

On Mon, 11 Feb 2019 09:43:52 -0500, Ed Pawlowski wrote:

On 2/11/2019 1:51 AM, wrote:
On Sun, 10 Feb 2019 16:18:57 -0500, Ed Pawlowski wrote:

On 2/10/2019 3:08 PM, rbowman wrote:


I'll admit in the '80s I wasn't too sure what Joe Sixpack was going to
do with a PC anyway. They were tools for me and what I was developing
was for industrial or embedded applications. When I bought an Osborne I
it came with SuperCalc and I never figured out what you're supposed to
do with it. 35 years later Excel still is a mystery. People do
impressive things with it but it reminds me of using a screwdriver for a
chisel.


The PC has many uses. For instance. instead of a $10 timer, you can use
a $2000 PC to turn a light on and off.

Excel has many uses too. You can track your utility bills every month
and eliminate the need for a pencil that has to be sharpened on occasion.

I do use Quicken though. It really does make banking easier and more
accurate than the old checkbook.

My main contact with excel is the data I get on water quality from
DEP.
It is OK if all you want to do is re sort columns and such but if I
really want to crunch numbers I still export it as a CSV, stuff it
into a dBase file and write a script. I assume I could do that with
Excel but this dog is too old too learn a new trick for the little I
need it.

At work I used Excel quite a bit. With a macro it was easy to do
production reports, inventory changes, and the like.

At home, I only had one practical use. About 9 years ago I had a new,
higher efficiency boiler installed. The idea was the savings would pay
for it over time. I tracked oil use and degree days for two years with
the old boiler, then started tracking the new one. I used the same
weather station for degree days. In seven years, the cost of the boiler
was saved, then I started to come ahead. Then we sold the house anyway
so the new owner gets the majority of benefits.

There are Excel people who can do wonders with it but it is the tool
they know. I am the same way with dBase. I have done dBase tricks like
writing out a loan table and printing payment coupons that I am sure
would be better suited to Excel but I use what I know.