21 Mar
2016
21 Mar
'16
8:11 p.m.
On Fri, 18 Mar 2016, scj(a)yaccman.com wrote:
At least in my experience, editing the "deck of
cards" (and certainly,
editing anything on magnetic tape) was really painful -- there was no
way to move blocks of text around -- you started at the beginning of the
file and had to edit lines in order (one shot per line) until you got to
the end. You could add lines or delete them, but only when you came to
them. The editor copied the edited file into an output file, and then
you had to do another step to copy the new version back over the
original one.
Memories of IEBUPDTE come to me... A very useful program, when it came to
doing things, ahem, not allowed by the computer centre, by us Comp Sci
kiddies...
Ah, the time I got SPITBOL to work beyond its use-by date, for example;
the thing was riddled with date checks (the first one was obvious, but the
rest not so much; its endearing habit was to jump to whatever was in R0 at
the time). I wrote something that searched for that particular date
string, and after inspecting the surrounding binary code I patched it...
The first time I tried to edit the deck on disc, I
specified the output
file to be equal to the input file. The program did not check this, and I
ended by nuking about 20% of the card images! Luckily I had a listing...
I punched out the trash on the disc and spent an entire weekend
rearranging and repunching the cards to get back to where I had been...
[...]
And who here hasn't done "cat file ... > file"?
It just goes to show that I should have taken my
mother's advice --
before you throw out a deck of cards, put a rubber band around it!
Walking down the corridors of Comp Sci, a student in front of me dropped
his entire deck of approx 2000 cards, all over the floor... I have no
idea whether he got them sorted, but I sure as hell used rubber bands
after that!
--
Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU) "Those who don't understand security will
suffer."