A bit of nostalgia

[Frank Millman]

Hi all

Sadly my ex-boss died recently. I learnt a huge amount from him. I also 
enjoyed and got valuable insights from his stories of 'the good old 
days', so I thought I would share a couple of them.

Back in the 1960's (long before we met) he worked for and eventually 
became manager of a large ICL bureau here in South Africa, running 
accounting and other applications for a number of corporate customers.

One day some new equipment arrived from UK. The engineers spent some 
time moving things around in the computer room and installing the new 
kit, but nobody told the software department what was going on. When it 
was finished, they were told 'Right, now you have disk drives.'

Up to that point, their programs used magnetic tape for data storage. A 
typical debtors run would involve loading a master file onto one tape 
drive, and a transaction file, sorted in account number sequence, onto a 
second tape drive. To print statements, the program would read the first 
master record, then read the first transaction record, if it found a 
match keep reading transactions until it hit a new account number, etc. 
When all reports were run, the last step was to create a new master file 
for the following month. This required mounting a scratch tape onto a 
third tape drive, and the program would run in a similar fashion but 
write a new record with an updated balance to the scratch tape on every 
change of account number.

When they asked how they were supposed to use the new disk drives, the 
answer was 'No idea, but there are the manuals' (no doubt several inches 
thick). After some discussion someone came up with an idea - load the 
master file onto one disk drive, the transaction file onto a second one, 
and a blank disk onto a third one. They ran it, it worked, and it ran 
much faster, so everyone was happy. Over time they realised that they 
could write the master record back onto the first drive, and slowly they 
adapted to a new way of developing applications.

The second story involves a rumour coming down the grapevine from UK 
that a new product was coming out that would put all their jobs at risk. 
It would make programming so easy that there would be no need to hire 
specialist programmers any more. Eventually this new product was 
released. It was called Cobol.

Up to that point they programmed everything in assembler. I recall my 
boss telling me that the ICL assembler was called PLAN, which was an 
acronym, but I forget what it stood for.

Frank Millman