Re: What could have been ...
It kept calm and carried on.
2862 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Dec 2015
10 PRINT "HELLO "; 20 GOTO 10
Ahh a wonderful game for machines that were left 'open' as demos way back in the day of a plethora of 'consumer' machines, all of which appeared to have some sort of basic interpreter available. HOWEVER
Invariably 10 PRINT "**** is sh*t "; 20 GOTO 10 was a more usual intervention.
No, at the age of 14 we were not very subtle let alone mature, and my partner assures me that 40 odd years later things have not improved.....
The joke amongst those doing proper degrees when I was a lad, was that at the end of the first year, they dropped the economics - too many hard sums, in the second, philosophy because the problems were too complex and that left them just reading politics for the last year - to their relief.
I have unfond memories of the 'Ryan Macfarland' Fortran compiler (I think I have the name right - it is 30 years) that came up with 'Unkown Fatal Erro' during compilation. This was for a large numerical; code I was working on.
After some experimentation - a sort of binary search on a rather wide range of parameters. I worked through naming, array sizes, variable mixes, expression complexity - I was tearing my hair out.
It turned out that a few of the variable names were too long (although within F77 standards). I was actually given a beer or three for the fix (and that was not cheap - I was working in Norway at the time) by my colleagues.
Compilation by friction was not an experience I had had up to then.
We had a 'industrial' grade coffee machine on similar terms. Our MD had got a very good deal. They did not anticipate the insatiable need for good coffee (and it was - roasted frequently and ground to order) by R&D staff, not to mention regular visits by the engineers in an attached factory. The maintenance engineer was there on a bi-weekly basis (the MD did know how to negotiate a tight SLA).
I left a couple of years later, but I wonder what the renegotiations looked like when they came!