• Lynn Pettis (10/21/2016)


    Ed Wagner (10/21/2016)


    TomThomson (10/21/2016)


    David.Poole (10/17/2016)


    I was aghast to find an old Clipper app still being maintained, although it didn't really need much maintaining. For next to no investment it was cheerfully generating £2million per year!

    A Clipper app - that was probably written before 1992 and very probably before 1995, although some apps were written later than that. Do you know when it actually dated from?

    The most ancient apps I ever came across were only 12 or 13 years old when I met them. I was asked to finish off a Deuce Alphacode interpreter for Myriad that someone else had written most of and then departed, because there were some alphacode (mid 50s vintage) apps that were supposedly still needed. No great hurry, as the Lab's aged Deuce was still working. I finished the interpreter, using bursts of output on the paper tape puch for the audible alarm signal, as the lab's Myriad had no audio output device. Did some testing with test apps, all seemed ok. Next I looked at the apps for which the thing was required,and discovered that these apps all triggered (audio) alarms at various points during execution to get the operator to do take notice and do something (can't remember what) so that rattling the tape punch wasn't acceptable because the apps produced paper tape output with a very strictly defined format so that rattles in the middle of it would effectively render the output useless. The tape reader wasn't the high speed one so not usable for audio output (being of the generation I am, I knew that a high speed optical tape reader could be used to play tunes, and eventually I learnt to do it but that was in a different company which actually had some of them.) So I tried to find out who was using the apps and whether these audio alarms were esential or could I use lights instead. Everyone I asked didn't use them, but thought someone else was maybe using them. After a brief discussion with my boss, the interpreter was "finished off" by canning it (or maybe just put away in case a need turned up - but I doubt that).

    There's a lot of people at my employer who use KEdit, which I think qualifies as ancient. It was written in 1983 and last updated in 1998 (our version, anyway). I know how people are about text editors, though, because I'm the same about UltraEdit. I even knew a guy who learned on Unix and had to get VI for Windows! :w00t:

    I love UltraEdit as well.

    Yeah, it's a keeper. I brought it with me because I bought it myself while working for my last employer. A number of people here have seen it and gotten the company to buy it for them. It know it's feature-creeped beyond belief, but it's just a really great text editor.