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“I wrote FAT on an airplane, for heaven's sake”

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Re: “I wrote FAT on an airplane, for heaven's sake”

#61

Post by pauljonas »

bluedino wrote: post #40
nknighthb wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But too young to know writing code and speccing data structures on paper (and/or napkins...) was quite common before airplane-friendly computers were available? (And for a long time after, really; ubiquitous ownership of laptops is a quite recent thing).

From this Woz quote it was pretty common: "I wrote all my code on paper in hexadecimal. I couldn't afford an assembler to translate my programs into hexadecimal bytes, I did it myself. Even my BASIC interpreter is all hand written. I'd type 4K into the Apple I and ][ in about an hour. I, and many others too I think, could sit down and start typing hexadecimal in for a SMALL program to solve something that occured or…

When I started my programming career, my first boss did not know how to use a text editor. He could perform a randomizing routine in his head but he trembled at using a text editor -- he still used punched cards and/or a mainframe utility that emulated a punch card. And lots of programmers coded first on columnar grid paper (shades of green and white, demarcations at 8, 12, 16 to help you indent properly.

Re: “I wrote FAT on an airplane, for heaven's sake”

#62

Post by judk »

jaggederest wrote: post #49
mrmaddog wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not exactly. I am a huge fan of code modularization, but what modularization offers you is the ability to decrease the exponent (i.e. to be devTime^1.01 instead of devTime^2). Some features though (including segment tuning, from the sound of it), will touch a ton of other features regardless of how well you modularize your code. I work at a networking company (Arista), and a lot of the interesting problems come from…

pg's whole thesis for lisp was that it reduces the increasing time of modifying larger codebases to o(log n) rather than o(n^k) or o(n) (n being size of codebase)

That is true of immutability languages like Clojure, O don't see how that is possible for a mutable dynamically typed language like CommonLisp

Re: “I wrote FAT on an airplane, for heaven's sake”

#64

Post by jussij »

troyk wrote: post #10

I'm old enough to know he didn't carry a computer on the plane....

Pen and paper works just fine on a plane and I'm old enough to know that back in those days lots of coding was done that way.

At one work place, I spent most of the day away from the computer (terminal) waiting for the operational boys to get their stuff done.

I would spend most of my coding day scribbling out code changes onto the fanfold printout.

Re: “I wrote FAT on an airplane, for heaven's sake”

#66

Post by rbanffy »

mathattack wrote: post #41
colmvp wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for pointing this out. It's all too common to overlook employee contributions to projects.

I think the point of the story wasn't proper attribution, it was a way for Gates to prod people to work faster.

By misappropriating their work?

Re: “I wrote FAT on an airplane, for heaven's sake”

#67

Post by teawrecks »

Am I the only one who didn't interpret the quote as him showing off? If I used that line, it would be a way of telling them that the problem of segment tuning is an artificial limitation imposed by a format that hasn't gotten enough attention. "I wrote FAT on an airplane" would be my way of saying, "don't come up with better ways to work around my half-assed implementation. spend time improving the implementation so segment tuning isn't even something you have to worry about."

Re: “I wrote FAT on an airplane, for heaven's sake”

#69

Post by TheCoelacanth »

protomyth wrote: post #36
troyk wrote: post #10

I'm old enough to know he didn't carry a computer on the plane....

According to one book (Hackers?), he wrote the loader code for BASIC for the Altair on the plane to NM. If I remember right, he did have a Compaq "portable" he lugged around in the early portable days. Something like http://oldcomputers.net/compaqi.html It obviously came out after DOS / FAT.

That was Paul Allen, if I remember correctly.

Re: “I wrote FAT on an airplane, for heaven's sake”

#70

Post by protomyth »

TheCoelacanth wrote: post #69
protomyth wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to one book (Hackers?), he wrote the loader code for BASIC for the Altair on the plane to NM. If I remember right, he did have a Compaq "portable" he lugged around in the early portable days. Something like http://oldcomputers.net/compaqi.html It obviously came out after DOS / FAT.

That was Paul Allen, if I remember correctly.

I'm pretty sure it was Bill Gates (although Paul Allen could of too). I thought the source was a Chaos Manor column back in the day.
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