termcap

[Bill Campbell]

On Thu, Apr 19, 2018, Fairlight via Filepro-list wrote:
>Because you're older, wiser, and more experienced than I?  :)
>
>Ya -try- and give someone credit...
>
>Yeah, it's stty lnext that's actually doing it for you.
>
>So...you disavow emacs, I take it?  :)  *duck*

Eight Megs and Constantly Swapping?  Too many keystrokes to do
things for me.  I'll type 10 characters before taking my fingers
off the home keys to reach for ESC, a function key, or the mouse.

Like you, I've done a lot of heads-down data entry in my life,
starting with 80-column Punch Cards on an IBM 026 keypunch were a
mistake required ditching that card and going to a new one.
Fortunately we went to Burroughs card punches which were fully
buffered and remembered the data from the last card punched.

I wrote a lot of COBOL programs to handle accounting for a
government contractor, and did all the data entry for new
functions to figure the most efficient way to handle it before
turning it over to the accounting staff.  Employee time sheets
were the largest data entry job, and I designed the card format
so that the first fields on the card had the employee number, the
next the contract, then the hours.  I had the drum card set to
auto-dup the employee number, then stop to enter contract number
(which could be dup'ed from the previous card with a single key
stroke), then stop to enter hours.  The program 2 drum card
stopped to enter all fields which would often waste a card if the
operator didn't switch before starting a new employee.

The drum cards for the key punches had two programs on them to
control the field widths, numeric or alphabetic, auto dup, etc.
It was easy to program the first one, but a bitch to program the
second which required lots of multi-punches.  One of the first
assembly language programs I wrote for the IBM 1130 would read
two program 1 cards, shift the punches from the 2nd card then
punch a new card with both programs.

I wrote another assembly program that would read a stack of cards,
put blanks in one output hopper, and in the second hopper if there
were any holes.  You would be amazed at the number of blank cards
people were tossing.

Bill
-- 
INTERNET:   bill at celestial.com  Bill Campbell; Celestial Software LLC
URL: http://www2.celestial.com/ PO Box 820; 6641 E. Mercer Way
Mobile:         (206) 947-5591  Mercer Island, WA 98040-0820
Fax:            (206) 232-9186  Skype: jwccsllc

Freedom from prices is freedom from responsibility. You can simply pass
laws, using the magic wand of government to satisfy your own desires at
unspecified costs to be paid by others. -- Thomas Sowell Aug 2000