Cool facts and articles

[ThomPaine]

Thanks Diggyba. I bet that guy's a great teacher. His students will remember that lesson for the rest of their lives. Hopefully those other teachers in the video were inspired.

[trousers]

Perhaps a bit morbid but a good time waster.
List of unusual deaths - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[Dustin]

I'm sure most of us have seen this video, but it's worth watching again.

[Prunepicker]

In One Second on the Internet

[Prunepicker]

[Prunepicker]

Blurred Out: 51 Things You Aren't Allowed to See on Google Maps - IT Security

[Achilleslastand]

Blurred Out: 51 Things You Aren't Allowed to See on Google Maps - IT Security

Speaking of the number 51 I didn't see Area 51 on the list.

[Dubya61]

Speaking of the number 51 I didn't see Area 51 on the list.

The government has recently admitted that Area 51 exists.

[RadicalModerate]

The government has recently admitted that Area 51 exists.

But this is just a smokescreen to divert people from looking for Area 52.

[Plutonic Panda]

But this is just a smokescreen to divert people from looking for Area 52.

So let me get this straight, let me get this straight. . . . you're telling me, there has been 50 other areas we don't know about?

[Prunepicker]

15 Handy Google Search Tricks | BizzNtech

[Plutonic Panda]

[Plutonic Panda]

[flintysooner]

I met her in about 1979 after she had delivered a speech. She spoke about what later came to be known as distributed computing. She said that when our ancestors encountered a tree so large that one ox couldn't move it that their solution was to use two oxen rather than wait to grow a bigger ox. At the end of her speech when people could go up and meet her she was giving out little pieces of wire that represented a nanosecond.

Also wrote many lines of COBOL code, too.

[ctchandler]

Amazing Grace!

[Prunepicker]

Amazing Grace!

How sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me.

[Prunepicker]

... Also wrote many lines of COBOL code, too.

Oy vey! COBOL drove me nutz! Did you ever enter it into the key punch
cards? Talk about an eternity.

[Prunepicker]

For the most part, I enjoy Google's salutes.

Here's today's. Hopefully it's not too late.
https://www.google.com/

[Plutonic Panda]

A sad statistic.



From The Planetary Society's Facebook page. https://www.facebook.com/planetarysociety

[flintysooner]

Oy vey! COBOL drove me nutz! Did you ever enter it into the key punch
cards? Talk about an eternity.

No I didn't start writing COBOL until 1979and by that time we had page editors that we could use on a display. I was at OU before Merrick was built in 1970 and really never gave computing a second thought. I had a slide rule though - a 12" one that I wore on my belt. The cool guys had 6" pocket slide rules and the really cool guys had circular slide rules.

There was an IBM System/360 I think in the Engineering building at OU and people would get their stacks of cards punched and then wait in line to run them. Seems like to me it might have been BAL but don't really remember. I know I did program in BAL when I started programming.

Things were very crude then but very exciting.

[Prunepicker]

No I didn't start writing COBOL until 1979...

Hey, that's a couple of years after I returned to academia. The Pirates
won the World Series and I was worried about playing Smetma's
Bartered Bride, which we called the Battered Broad.

I was on the front page of the Daily Oklahoman playing cello. Hey, I'm a
bassist, but only because I could make more Geetus, i.e more $$$. Chick
photogs are nice but nothing beats paying the bills.

Viva La Basso!

[Plutonic Panda]

This is what I call true dedication!

Snapping an Earth Story style photo

Hawaiian photographer Kawika Singson was snapped while taking the sort of photo that we like to share on TES. A big thumbs up to all the magnificent image takers who enrich our pages.

Loz

Image credit: Christopher Hirata.

From The Earth Story on Facebook. https://www.facebook.com/TheEarthSto...695795458135:0

[ctchandler]

I was an assembler programmer from 1965 till 1981. Autocoder in the first couple of years, then BAL in the latter years. I did learn COBOL in the late 60's so I used both COBOL and assembler. I used to write my COBOL program on "coding sheets" and turn them over to the keypunch operator to punch them on cards for me.
C. T.

[SoonerDave]

No I didn't start writing COBOL until 1979and by that time we had page editors that we could use on a display. I was at OU before Merrick was built in 1970 and really never gave computing a second thought. I had a slide rule though - a 12" one that I wore on my belt. The cool guys had 6" pocket slide rules and the really cool guys had circular slide rules.

There was an IBM System/360 I think in the Engineering building at OU and people would get their stacks of cards punched and then wait in line to run them. Seems like to me it might have been BAL but don't really remember. I know I did program in BAL when I started programming.

Things were very crude then but very exciting.

COBOL was on the downslide by the time I got to OU in the late 80's. I had my COBOL class - it was still required - but I never went near it again in school or at work.

I did my assembler on that same 360 at OU, and loved it. Never did the punch cards, though As an engineering student, I had an account on the ECN (a PDP11/70 running Unix back then) and you could use RJE to send card images created in a regular editor as remote jobs to the 360, and the 360 would send the results back. It was sweetness....to a lot of other students during that time, the fact that I never used a punchcard deck made me a bit of a wizard (bwahahahahah)...

Lots of computing majors from the Arts and Sciences department had no way of doing RJE like that, and I saw LOTS of card decks floating around

I think of that time as a bit of a "golden era" in computing, just ahead of the PC era, and somehow software development just isn't the same. No desire to understand how systems work, or to try to put things together artfully or from a systems perspective...but I digress...

[flintysooner]

I was an assembler programmer from 1965 till 1981. Autocoder in the first couple of years, then BAL in the latter years. I did learn COBOL in the late 60's so I used both COBOL and assembler. I used to write my COBOL program on "coding sheets" and turn them over to the keypunch operator to punch them on cards for me.
C. T.

Thats how I remember coding BAL on sheets. Then someone had to keypunch or later key it in for mag cards. One mag card was 256 bytes. I am certain that sounds funny to current programmers.

But my first programs only had 4K bytes to run in so we had to write all these overlays and include a process to load and unload them.

Probably the most complex thing I wrote had to do with operating a ledger feed and posting system.

The great thing about mag cards was I could code, compile, and test really quickly as in a few hours contrasted to punch cards or tape that might take a few days or weeks.

I really liked BAL.