I have been using computers for over 60 years, starting with a cards in/cards out IBM 650 to Univac mainframes to the earliest personal computer to “The Computer for the Rest of Us” (The Macintosh). Look up the ad “Why 1984 will not be 1984”.
Unfortunately, 1984 arrived with Apple’s OS X. Everything has changed from gradual changes to complete changes that make previous data unusable, requiring days and weeks to update. Many of these changes are difficult to decipher or many hours to undo (like an update that moved giga-bytes of data to the cloud.
Now Yahoo! had done that with it Finance pages.
For years, I have kept a spreadsheet of weekly data for several stocks or mutual funds. I had Yahoo! set up to give me closing prices every Friday.
I missed a week and when I tried to have Yahoo! give me my data, nothing happened. i went to bed frustrated not knowing what had changed.
On Saturday, I figured out that I had to completely rebuild my list. When I requested the list, I found out that it had the high and low prices but not the closing prices which is what I really wanted.
I went to Yahoo! help section and found out that I was not alone. Many commenters were very upset about the changes.
Well, back to figuring out how to get the data I want.
https://yahoo.uservoice.com/forums/382977-finance/suggestions/38499625-think-your-changes-out-before-springing-them-on-us
Showing posts with label IBM 650. Show all posts
Showing posts with label IBM 650. Show all posts
Sunday, September 01, 2019
Wednesday, March 14, 2018
A newspaper’s takeover of subscribers’ computers
Given the increasing complexity of software and its decreasing user-friendliness, I think 1984 has arrived. We are supposed to follow robotically through the latest commands of the software designer, aka Big Brother. And like in 1984, we have no idea what we are doing or should be doing.
I have almost 59 years of computer experience. I started with a summer job in which I used a textbook to learn to program an IBM 650. That was a set of large refrigerator size boxes with punched cards in and punched cards out.
Over the next twenty-plus years I went on to program and debug larger and larger computers. I was often an advocate of newer techniques, like using compilers instead of machine code or using email instead of typed memos.
Then personal computers appeared on the scene. Some of them easy to use, some of them opaque to use. In 1984, the Macintosh appeared. It was a real break-through in ease of use. Many laughed at WIMP (Windows, Icons, Menus, Pictures). They preferred the complex set of coding that had to be done for the simplest tasks.
I was hooked and became a Certified Macintosh Developer. I was eager to get the latest Mac with many great features: color, faster and smaller storage devices, and more.
Then OS-X (operating system 10) appeared. It had many nifty features except ease of transferring older programs to it. I never got around to rewriting my genealogy program and have lost all that data (except that which I had printed out). On the other hand, there were many new features that were a delight to use.
But as one OS X after another followed, the Mac started being persnickety. Printers that were easy to use became a nightmare. Where is the setting to print an envelope. Why does the scanner work well with an old OS but gives dark blobs on a newer OS?
Then sin of sins, without asking me, Apple decided I should install the latest operating system just because I was using wi-fi at a coffee shop. Not only did Apple decide that I should upgrade, it decided that all my files in the Document folder should go to iCloud. But that was more data than my free 5GB. It asked me to upgrade my account to 50GB. The extra $0.99 a month was no big deal, but I still haven’t completely reorganized my Document file so that I don’t need be hooked up to the web to use those files.
The same increasing difficulty has struck many web-sites. I now subscribe to four newspapers. Most of them generally work well with only a few quirks that take awhile to figure out. Just like the print versions, the newspapers are filled with ads. Generally you can just scroll past them.
But sometime last year, the Star Tribune began to have intrusive ads. They would take over the computer with no obvious way out. Not only would the ad page take over the tab slot on a browser, there was no way to get out of it except close the tab or follow it on to other pages in the ad chain.
A similar annoyance is a side-bar ad with a misleading message: “Log In”. It is not a log in to the newspaper, but an ad for using a Google product for signing in to web sites.
A friendly guy at Star Tribune’s support department helped me try to clear things up. But it was drastic, including resetting my iPad. Guess what that did? It wiped out all my cookies so that I had to enter saved passwords all over again. Good thing I have the passwords stored in an obscure place.
Rather than making my life simple by easily accessing my bank accounts, reading the latest news, and sending email to friends, I seem to have gone into standby debug mode.
Unfortunately, one of those pop-ups appeared again this morning. That’s it. I asked the Star Tribune to cancel my subscription. Bye to “The Brilliant Mind of Edison Lee” and many other comics that are not in the Duluth News Tribune. Good-bye to many in-depth state stories and editorials.
I do have relatives who spend a small fortune calling Geek Squad every time time they need to make some software change. Do you think the Star Tribune would pay me for all my efforts? Do you think your phone will run forever without re-charging?
P.S. Well, maybe I'll keep the Star Tribune subscription for a few more days. It worked fine this morning.
I have almost 59 years of computer experience. I started with a summer job in which I used a textbook to learn to program an IBM 650. That was a set of large refrigerator size boxes with punched cards in and punched cards out.
Over the next twenty-plus years I went on to program and debug larger and larger computers. I was often an advocate of newer techniques, like using compilers instead of machine code or using email instead of typed memos.
Then personal computers appeared on the scene. Some of them easy to use, some of them opaque to use. In 1984, the Macintosh appeared. It was a real break-through in ease of use. Many laughed at WIMP (Windows, Icons, Menus, Pictures). They preferred the complex set of coding that had to be done for the simplest tasks.
I was hooked and became a Certified Macintosh Developer. I was eager to get the latest Mac with many great features: color, faster and smaller storage devices, and more.
Then OS-X (operating system 10) appeared. It had many nifty features except ease of transferring older programs to it. I never got around to rewriting my genealogy program and have lost all that data (except that which I had printed out). On the other hand, there were many new features that were a delight to use.
But as one OS X after another followed, the Mac started being persnickety. Printers that were easy to use became a nightmare. Where is the setting to print an envelope. Why does the scanner work well with an old OS but gives dark blobs on a newer OS?
Then sin of sins, without asking me, Apple decided I should install the latest operating system just because I was using wi-fi at a coffee shop. Not only did Apple decide that I should upgrade, it decided that all my files in the Document folder should go to iCloud. But that was more data than my free 5GB. It asked me to upgrade my account to 50GB. The extra $0.99 a month was no big deal, but I still haven’t completely reorganized my Document file so that I don’t need be hooked up to the web to use those files.
The same increasing difficulty has struck many web-sites. I now subscribe to four newspapers. Most of them generally work well with only a few quirks that take awhile to figure out. Just like the print versions, the newspapers are filled with ads. Generally you can just scroll past them.
But sometime last year, the Star Tribune began to have intrusive ads. They would take over the computer with no obvious way out. Not only would the ad page take over the tab slot on a browser, there was no way to get out of it except close the tab or follow it on to other pages in the ad chain.
A similar annoyance is a side-bar ad with a misleading message: “Log In”. It is not a log in to the newspaper, but an ad for using a Google product for signing in to web sites.
A friendly guy at Star Tribune’s support department helped me try to clear things up. But it was drastic, including resetting my iPad. Guess what that did? It wiped out all my cookies so that I had to enter saved passwords all over again. Good thing I have the passwords stored in an obscure place.
Rather than making my life simple by easily accessing my bank accounts, reading the latest news, and sending email to friends, I seem to have gone into standby debug mode.
Unfortunately, one of those pop-ups appeared again this morning. That’s it. I asked the Star Tribune to cancel my subscription. Bye to “The Brilliant Mind of Edison Lee” and many other comics that are not in the Duluth News Tribune. Good-bye to many in-depth state stories and editorials.
I do have relatives who spend a small fortune calling Geek Squad every time time they need to make some software change. Do you think the Star Tribune would pay me for all my efforts? Do you think your phone will run forever without re-charging?
P.S. Well, maybe I'll keep the Star Tribune subscription for a few more days. It worked fine this morning.
Thursday, August 21, 2014
What did I learn outside school?
Last week I asked what did I learn in school, with an emphasis on how much I had forgotten of what I supposedly learned. What I really learned in school was to learn. I had teachers who excited me about a subject, and I had subjects that excited me even if the teacher didn’t.
I also had many other people outside school who enticed me to learn, something too many kids don’t have. The high point of this seems to me to have been when we lived with my mother’s aunt and uncle, especially between the ages of 9 and 14. My environment was rich with printed publications.
They subscribed to the morning Cleveland Plain Dealer and the afternoon Cleveland Press. They subscribed to Saturday Evening Post or one or two of its competitors. They may have even subscribed to National Geographic. I loved comic books and subscribed to Walt Disney Comics and bought Looney Tunes from time to time. But we also had books. I remember having a set of “East Wind Stories”, a set of stories about fictional animals. I borrowed books from the school library and the downtown public library.
We also listened to the radio. I remember that Aunt Gertrude had to have the station changed five minutes before Walter Winchell came on: “Good evening, Mr. and Mrs. America from border to border and coast to coast and all the ships at sea. Let's go to press.” We also had 78 rpm records and listened sometimes to the station that played some classical music. Was that WDOK? I remember preferring piano music to violin music because the pitch was often lower. And of course, lots of pop music.
We had no TV then. I remember a when TV cameraman came to the sledding hill I often went to. He filmed me going down the hill with hands and feet in the air. To see the newscast, we stood outside a TV store. We also went to the TV studio where they graciously showed it to us.
I had many more outside school learning experiences before I graduated from high school, but in interest of space, I’ll skip forward to the summer before my senior year of college. I wanted to learn about computers and found a summer job at Ohio Oil Company (Marathon). Because I was put in a clerical job rather than a computer job, I borrowed Elliott Organick’s “Programming the IBM 650” from the company library. With that knowledge, I wrote a program to calculate the square root of any number. I gave it to my supervisor who passed it on to others. Within days I was transferred to a group more closely involved in computers. Eventually I was given the task of writing a program to process quotas for gas stations and others. I had lots of help from others on details of how the IBM 650 worked. On my last day, I handed in the manual for how to use the program. I think it was used by Ohio Oil for a year or two.
When I graduated from Ohio Wesleyan, Case took me back for a masters program in mathematics. Not only that, but I was given a graduate assistantship in the Computer Center that covered tuition and paid $75 a week too!
One of the jobs of Computer Center assistants was to provide help to sophomores who were taking the mandatory numerical analysis course. We started in July, were given the ALGOL manual for Burroughs 220 and let loose. In the fall, we were answering all kinds of questions for the undergraduates.
We also learned the assembler called SAVE written by a PhD candidate. As a project for the only computer class I took, I wrote a simpler assembler called HELP, of which SAVE was the answer. Darned if there wasn’t somebody using HELP long after I left Case.
Case had ordered a Univac 1107 and I learned its assembler and instruction set from a manual. When I completed my master’s work I applied for work with Univac and was hired. I was first set to some mathematical project that I had no idea of how to proceed. Luckily for me that group was dissolved and I was moved into the FORTRAN compiler support group. My boss never learned to write FORTRAN but he was a crackerjack at solving problems with the compiler. I wound up solving problems with the FORTRAN library, pieces of code called on by users that did things not part of FORTRAN itself, like mathematical functions. I never took a class in the compiler or the assembler it was written in. We just jumped in and started solving problems.
Because I did have experience (or was it interest) in ALGOL, I was given the responsibility for fixing problems in the compiler, written by somebody else. A Norwegian customer wrote an extension for simulation, called, surprise, SIMULA. Without any training except the manual and trial and error, I fixed problems in SIMULA and its library.
I spent nearly twenty years at UNIVAC and kept learning things on the fly and even giving classes in what I learned! I’ve lost track of the software I learned.
Then I went off on my own and learned more and more computers and software. Even now with thirty years experience with the Macintosh, I learn something new with every release. I’ve lost track of the number of software programs I’ve learned.
With these I’ve learned three things: software can be easy, software can be obtuse, and we ain’t seen nothing yet!
Also published in the Reader Weekly, 2014-08-14 at http://duluthreader.com/articles/2014/08/21/3928_what_did_i_learn_outside_school.
I also had many other people outside school who enticed me to learn, something too many kids don’t have. The high point of this seems to me to have been when we lived with my mother’s aunt and uncle, especially between the ages of 9 and 14. My environment was rich with printed publications.
They subscribed to the morning Cleveland Plain Dealer and the afternoon Cleveland Press. They subscribed to Saturday Evening Post or one or two of its competitors. They may have even subscribed to National Geographic. I loved comic books and subscribed to Walt Disney Comics and bought Looney Tunes from time to time. But we also had books. I remember having a set of “East Wind Stories”, a set of stories about fictional animals. I borrowed books from the school library and the downtown public library.
We also listened to the radio. I remember that Aunt Gertrude had to have the station changed five minutes before Walter Winchell came on: “Good evening, Mr. and Mrs. America from border to border and coast to coast and all the ships at sea. Let's go to press.” We also had 78 rpm records and listened sometimes to the station that played some classical music. Was that WDOK? I remember preferring piano music to violin music because the pitch was often lower. And of course, lots of pop music.
We had no TV then. I remember a when TV cameraman came to the sledding hill I often went to. He filmed me going down the hill with hands and feet in the air. To see the newscast, we stood outside a TV store. We also went to the TV studio where they graciously showed it to us.
I had many more outside school learning experiences before I graduated from high school, but in interest of space, I’ll skip forward to the summer before my senior year of college. I wanted to learn about computers and found a summer job at Ohio Oil Company (Marathon). Because I was put in a clerical job rather than a computer job, I borrowed Elliott Organick’s “Programming the IBM 650” from the company library. With that knowledge, I wrote a program to calculate the square root of any number. I gave it to my supervisor who passed it on to others. Within days I was transferred to a group more closely involved in computers. Eventually I was given the task of writing a program to process quotas for gas stations and others. I had lots of help from others on details of how the IBM 650 worked. On my last day, I handed in the manual for how to use the program. I think it was used by Ohio Oil for a year or two.
When I graduated from Ohio Wesleyan, Case took me back for a masters program in mathematics. Not only that, but I was given a graduate assistantship in the Computer Center that covered tuition and paid $75 a week too!
One of the jobs of Computer Center assistants was to provide help to sophomores who were taking the mandatory numerical analysis course. We started in July, were given the ALGOL manual for Burroughs 220 and let loose. In the fall, we were answering all kinds of questions for the undergraduates.
We also learned the assembler called SAVE written by a PhD candidate. As a project for the only computer class I took, I wrote a simpler assembler called HELP, of which SAVE was the answer. Darned if there wasn’t somebody using HELP long after I left Case.
Case had ordered a Univac 1107 and I learned its assembler and instruction set from a manual. When I completed my master’s work I applied for work with Univac and was hired. I was first set to some mathematical project that I had no idea of how to proceed. Luckily for me that group was dissolved and I was moved into the FORTRAN compiler support group. My boss never learned to write FORTRAN but he was a crackerjack at solving problems with the compiler. I wound up solving problems with the FORTRAN library, pieces of code called on by users that did things not part of FORTRAN itself, like mathematical functions. I never took a class in the compiler or the assembler it was written in. We just jumped in and started solving problems.
Because I did have experience (or was it interest) in ALGOL, I was given the responsibility for fixing problems in the compiler, written by somebody else. A Norwegian customer wrote an extension for simulation, called, surprise, SIMULA. Without any training except the manual and trial and error, I fixed problems in SIMULA and its library.
I spent nearly twenty years at UNIVAC and kept learning things on the fly and even giving classes in what I learned! I’ve lost track of the software I learned.
Then I went off on my own and learned more and more computers and software. Even now with thirty years experience with the Macintosh, I learn something new with every release. I’ve lost track of the number of software programs I’ve learned.
With these I’ve learned three things: software can be easy, software can be obtuse, and we ain’t seen nothing yet!
Also published in the Reader Weekly, 2014-08-14 at http://duluthreader.com/articles/2014/08/21/3928_what_did_i_learn_outside_school.
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