Tandy Silver

[Laura Brody]

On Wed, 25 Aug 2004 16:25:12 -0700, Bill Campbell <bill at celestial.com> wrote:

> On Wed, Aug 25, 2004, Bill Vermillion wrote:
> ...
>> I was glad when we got off those slow machines.  The 80386 machine
>> came from the first department every to have FP there and that was
>> on an old Tandy 6000.  It's 5 hour processing would have been more
>> like 5 days on the 6K.
>
> Recompiling my Unify based accounting system was an all day job on the
> Model 16s and takes about ten minutes today on a fairly slow machine
> running OpenServer 5.0.6a.  The Tandy 4000 running Xenix was faster than an
> NCR Tower I was using at the time.  Every new machine makes me wonder how I
> lived with the older ones.

	When I joined SCC in 1987, the computer we developed
v3.0 on was a NCR Tower running at a whopping 1 mhz. There
were 4 of us programming, and when one of us  had to recompile
the .o librarys and link in *clerk or * report, that person
had about 20-25 minutes to kill. Lenny and I (as the new
hires) practiced juggling during these times. Dave started
us off with some basic lessons. At the time, Ken said
that he could "kinda" juggle, but never demonstated it.
Howie could also keep 3 balls in the air. With the speed
(or lack there of) of that computer, I am amazed that we
accomplished anything.

	A few years later, we got individual PCs networked
together. The PCs were something like 386/133s. Juggling
time went down to about 10-15 minutes.

	Around 1993, Ken & Ron managed to get 486s on their
desks. I canibilized parts (HD and RAM) out of two computers
so that I would have a PC that could run Windows (slowly) and
write the online help files using RoboHelp. When I compiled
those files, it would take about 30-40 minuets - I would
do the compile once at lunch time and again at the end of
the day. There would be a bunch of syntax errors and typos
to wade through (some were my errors, but most were RoboHelp
created errors such as a space inserted into a hyper text
reference). George yelled at me one day around lunch
time and asked me why wasn't I working. I explained the
situation. His solution wasn't to get me a faster PC, he
told me to only do the compile at the end of the day just
before I punched out and to correct the errors in the
morning. Knowing that *that* solution wasn't going to
work, Ken wrote a small utility program for me which would
find the errors that RoboHelp would create that I could
quickly run several times a day so that when I ran the
compiler at the end of the day, I wouldn't have a ton
of errors to wade through in the morning.

	Ken & I have decided that Alex (now 7), is old enough
to learn to program - yes, we will probably start him off
with filePro <g>. His computer is a AMD Athlon 1.1 Ghz,
128 meg RAM, 6 Gig HD. This childs computer could run circles
around ANYTHING we had at SCC. I don't miss working with the
crappy slow computers, but I loved the work - a very similar
situation to when I worked in the wax room (I removed the
seam from a wax duplicate of the finished piece) at the
art foundry, Tallix, when it was in Peekskill. I got to
meet artists like Anthony Quinn (a total gentleman),
and Nancy Graves (a ping pong ball in a wind storm). I
also worked on pieces by Remington, Erte, and a bunch
of others. I loved the actual work - it was the
management decisions and policies that gave me ulcers.
-- 
Laura Brody, Publisher of the filePro Developer's Journal
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