Hi, On Saturday 09 October 2004 17:35, Örn Hansen wrote:
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Old IBM mainframes, used to have consoles that operators sat and watched for messages. When an error message, or any other message, popped up on the screen it was in the form of F50347, with some message attached and you had to look up in a pile of manuals, to figure it out. Because the message, was really short. Once you looked into the manual, it often referred to another message F40527 (These numbers are made up, merely to look like the originals and have no real relevance to the original messages), and often you had to look into yet another manual to read that description.
If you read "The Mythical Man-Month," you'll find an anecdote by Brooks about the abject profligacy of making a 26-byte piece of special-case calendar code (for leap years) memory-resident in the OS/360 code. Heaven forefend! The horror of such a hideous waste!! This is what comes of memory conservation mania.
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Randall Schulz