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Archive   : NARC40.ZIP
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ODDS AND ENDS OF INTEREST



Origin of the term DEBUG.

During WWII, the war department was using the Mark I
computer, your basic monsterous machine that gobbled up electricity
and raditated a huge amount of heat. The machine was used for
targeting, trajectory and fuel consumption calculations. Since
these were the days before air conditioning, the machine was run
mostly at night. The machine was made of up a lot of mechanical
flip-flops (one of the primary gates in any computer). One night
the computer failed to function and it was found that a moth had
given up the ghost when caught by one of the flip-flop contacts.
It is not hard to imagine, that the running joke was something to
do with whether or not someone had "debugged" the machine lately.
The rest is history or frustration or something.


Origin of the GW in GWBASIC

No big deal here, the GW stands for Gee Whiz

Origin of the term "Winchester" drive

Ken Haughton a member of the IBM design team that designed
the DASD (direct-access-storage-device) coined
the term "Winchester" since the model 3340 had two 30M
modules and reminded him of his Winchester 30-30 rifle.
The year was 1973 and the term is still prevalent.

The first 32-bit "microprocessor"

This was actually a 4 chip set that adjunctly formed a
32 bit microprocessor. The set was called "IMP" by
National Semiconductor and was used by Honeywell in
their 1000 series environmental controllers.

About Programming

"Programming is a series of discoveries leading you from one plateau
of understanding to another... The trick is not to step in the stuff
between the plateaus."

- taken from a cartoon

"A programmer IS his own worst enemy."

- Gary Conway

"The sooner you go to the keyboard, the longer the project takes."

- Gary Conway

More about programming

"Computer programmers are among the great innovators of our times.
Unhappily, among their most enduring accomplishments are several new
techniques for wasting time. There is no shortage of horror stories
about programs that took twenty times as long to debug as they did to
"write". And one hears again and again about programs that had to be
started over several times because they were not well thought out
the first time around. But much less is said of what may be the most
successfully mastered time-wasting technique among students of
programming: finding information about the machine. Spending hours
trying to locate a single, simple fact is a veritable rite of passage
for new programmers - as is ripping up reference books in a red-eyed
frenzy.
A typical programmer's morning after CRT eye strain, a six
foot pile of crumpled printouts, and two dozen reference books all over
the floor. Among these books are hardware tech reference manuals, DOS
tech reference manuals, language reference manuals, spec sheets on
particular chips, hardware manuals for printers and boards, plus
a dozen or so computer books, each possessing some prized bit of
information required at 3 AM by a particularly intricate bit of code."

- taken from "PROGRAMMER'S PROBLEM SOLVER" by Robert Jourdain


"The truth is incontrovertible. Panic may resent it; ignorance may
deride it; malice may distort it; but there it is."

Winston Churchill

Misc.

"A wolf is still a wolf is still a wolf, even though it doesn't
eat your sheep."

- unknown

"A pint can't hold a quart. When holding a pint, it is doing
the best that it can."

- unknown

"Hardware: A product that if you play with it long enough, breaks."
"Software: A product that if you play with it long enough, it works."

- unknown

"The two most important gifts from a parent to his child are,
ROOTS and WINGS"


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