Canadian English and Fortran IV with Watfor and Watfiv

I worked on a system where the Fortran compiler generated constants in memory locations. All subroutine calls used pass by reference, so it was very easy for a constant to get changed. And very difficult to debug with the tools available in that day and age.

The developers of MSDOS (and its successors) were too short sighted to learn from real OSs of the day which used GMT or UTC in the hardware clock and converted for display. Those early versions used local time in the hardware clock. Remember when we had to manually reset the time twice a year? The USB drive is using the FAT file system, from that era - the timestamps are local times.

I loved that ascii art Einstein portrait. If you don't know how the math works you will get it wrong. Consider floating point on the Univac 36-bit machines vs the Honeywell 36-bit machines. I was tasked with porting a computationally heavy application suite. As I recall, the Univac floating point registers were the same size and format as the memory values. The Honeywell registers were a different size, so you lost bits of precision when you stored a value. The result of calculations in registers did not compare equal to the same value after it had been stored to memory. Not only did I need to know how computer math worked, but how it was implemented on two different machines.

Welcome to the club. I got there a couple of months back when I saw one of the Adobe updaters pulling down some McAfee product. Without asking first. I immediately killed the update and uninstall all Adobe products. I don't use McAfee products because I use another vendor's anti-virus products. I'm using SumatraPDF now, but it was a difficult choice between several open source and freeware PDF readers. I've since reinstalled Flash. But I use a flash blocker in Firefox so I only see the movies if I want to.

I don't (any more). One of Adobe's products attempted to install some 3rd party software recently, without asking my permission. I removed all Adobe software immediately, including Flash, Acrobat Reader, and Adobe download manager. Never shall those products annoy me with an update notice again.

Nothing can beat the thrill of successfully booting an old Digital Equipment PDP-8, a 12-bit computer with 4096 bytes of RAM. First, use the front panel switches to toggle in the binary code for the paper tape loader you wrote in assembler and translated to binary. Then run that loader to read a disk bootstrap loader that you programmed, hand assembled and manually punched to paper tape, from the paper tape reader. Finally run the disk bootstrap loader to get the vendor's operating system from disk. Now you can use the KSR-33 tele-type to interact with the OS. Programming continues to get easier, but you never forget the early days.

Like crack, your first hit is for free ...