[Info-vax] MAX record size in a sequential file

[Paul Sture]

On Wed, 16 May 2012 08:38:21 -0500, Bob Koehler wrote:

> In article
> <ef4e88ca-38c0-426d-b4b5-3a61285d5d03 at qg3g2000pbc.googlegroups.com>,
> Steven Schweda <sms.antinode at gmail.com> writes:
>> 
>>    In the pre-Selectric era, pushing the carriage back would
>> do it.  Pushing on the handle did the vertical advance. Pushing on the
>> end of the platen did not.
> 
>    Prior to Selectric there were plenty of electric typewriters with
>    buttons for carriage return, line feed, or both.  The big button did
>    both.
> 
>    But generally when we wanted to overtype an entire line uaually to
>    add underscores) we pushed the lever hard enough to get the line
>    advance, or hit the wrong button, out of habit, the reached up and
>    rolled the line back.  Worked on LA36 and LA120, too, although we
>    generally did it programmatically.
> 
>    But those knobs were missing from our VTs.  And overtyping with
>    underscores left the text on the VT hard to read.

I once worked on a project where you entered for example a start date and 
end date before producing a printout.  Needless to say it wasn't long 
before customers with real data started complaining that this tied a 
terminal up for too long.  We devised a system of dumping the program's 
working storage to disk and submitting a batch job to pick it up and 
produce the report.

The next step of course was that the customer wanted to view those 
reports from a VT and optionally manipulate print queue entries.

You wouldn't believe how many programmers had done "clever things" in 
those reports, <CR>, reverse line feeds, backspace, the lot, and yours 
truly had to unravel that lot.

It was actually quite fun seeing what I'd come across next :-)



-- 
Paul Sture