I remember that! They also had error number 69 - no path to partner in their RSX system. Early networking.

Probably the Motor Vehicle modernization project at the State of California. The run an EDL emulator on AIX. They are moving their back-end transaction processing to CICS COBOL. Once in a while someone is able to negotiate a good rate.

State of California (DMV) is moving to COBOL right now. Seriously.

If I play solitaire with a physical deck of cards, I can easily cheat. I can turn over the stack anytime that I want. If I play solitaire with XP, I can't. Does it matter? If I do some simple bookkeeping with Excel, I can change old numbers with no audit trail. If the audit trail is important, then the requirements might dictate a full enterprise or at least secure accounting package. Do we really care if a game allows cheating? Of course many applications require security, but some applications are just tools and don't have much of a security requirement.

My Colleague uses 80 column punch cards. They fit well in a shirt pocket, hold a lot more information than a typical post-it and don't get gummy. He snagged a couple of boxes some years back. They also make great conversation with the younger kids at work.

I believe that this falls under the group of algorithms known as pessimal. For the academic treatment, please see: http://www.bowdoin.edu/~ltoma/teaching/cs231/fall03/broder86pessimal.pdf[^]

There is a very comprehensive article at Wikipedia on this subject: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_orthography[^] Languages do not evolve in complete isolation. Much of English spelling is a result of loan words. In many instances, the original transcription from a different alphabet is preserved in the spelling. One of the examples in the article concerns the apparent inconsistent useage of the letters y and i in non-final positions, which in some cases is a result of Greek versus Germanic origins. The various uses of g are listed in a table.