On Wed, 1 May 2019 18:06:32 +0000, Jesse 1 Robinson wrote:
>My first tube in 1978 at TRW (ancestor of Experian) was a Raytheon wannabe.
>Don’t remember the model number, but it may have been a takeoff of '3270'.
>
I remember something like that. All the logic was in a control box, connected
to the displays by forearm-diameter (well, maybe half) cables. If I inserted
enough
characters at the front of a 900-character string it got slower and slower;
finally
the controller crashed and automatically rebooted.
>There was an up-down case switch, but it may have changed the display only--
>
... transmitting lower case to the host, regardless. Was that modal behavior
of similar IBM terminals?
>a real horse's ass.
>
Uh-huh.
>... I haven't noticed a mention in this thread, but the clackity-clack
>printers we had in those days *were* upper case only. If you can find, say,
>ancient MACLIB'S from back in the day, all text was upper case. And
>punctuation marks were avoided because many printers couldn't handle them. For
>example,
>
> ARE VALUES NOW EQUAL...
>
We had a line printer (Documation) on which we kept a T-11 band It was about
40%
busy. But during the that 40%, the clackity-clack was the tongues of assembler
programmers bemoaning how much slower their hexadecimal reports printed than
if we had kept a P-11 band mounted. Old biases die hard.
>BTW a rendition like "UCB'S" was common to distinguish plural from a singular
>control blocks ending in "S". I cringe now when I see "UCB's". Ungrammatical
>and unnecessary in up-to-date Kansas City.
>
The convention is evolving:
https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/55970/plurals-of-acronyms-letters-numbers-use-an-apostrophe-or-not
(I'm just keystroke-parsimonious.)
-- gil
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