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Back in the long ago time, DEC created one of the first rule-based expert systems. The system was used by their sales folks when filling orders for PDP and VAX machines to ensure that the requested configuration included all the components, cables, software, etc. required.
The expert system was called R1.
Software Zen: delete this;
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For years I specialized in DEC equipment, worked on quite a few models, but favorite was the MicroVAX.
Decent machines for the day.
PartsBin an Electronics Part Organizer - An updated version available!
JaxCoder.com
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I did some programming on MicroVax. Pretty cool machine at the time. Amazing OS.
"A little time, a little trouble, your better day"
Badfinger
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Yeah the OS was a good one, so good;
Quote: And now...the rest of the story: I'll take you on a short tour of NT's lineage, which leads back to Digital and its VMS OS. Most of NT's lead developers, including VMS's chief architect, came from Digital, and their background heavily influenced NT's development. After I talk about NT's roots, I'll discuss the more-than-coincidental similarities between NT and VMS, and how Digital reacted to NT's release.
PartsBin an Electronics Part Organizer - An updated version available!
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I also had access to a VAX cluster. One could run a program that could be spread across the cluster (network) with the right system calls. Been so long ago, I can't recall the details, but I was fresh out of computer science grad school so the exposure to such a system was quite exciting. Used VMS version of Fortran.
"A little time, a little trouble, your better day"
Badfinger
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Gary R. Wheeler wrote: The system was used by their sales folks when filling orders for PDP and VAX machines to ensure that the requested configuration included all the components, cables, software, etc. required.
In my student days, in the very early 1980s, I was chatting with an architect about computers. She told that their office had just bought one. If you are old enough to remember computers in 1981-82: We made 'graphics' on the line printer from '|' and '-' characters and pixels from white (space) to black (a lot of characters printed on top of each other). Not quite the quality you would like to present in a prospect presented by a large architecture office. So I asked how they used the PC.
They had a floppy disk with the Norwegian Building Standard (or whatever it is called in English - a set of construction requirements that every contractor must adhere to) in a database format, and a second floppy with the dBase executable. Before they made a bid, they had this dBase application go trough it, checking it against the Building Standard to see if the bid included the cost of every single little piece required by the Standard; invariably, they were reminded of things like door stoppers and cabinet door handles that they had overlooked when making the cost calculations for their bid. In the first bid processed by this software, they were reminded of so many such small cost elements that they increased their bid by more than the cost of the computer and all its software - yet, they won the bid. So the PC paid for itself in full through its first job!
I asked the architect what size hard disk they had. No, they had no hard disk. It was a twin floppy system. The specific bid information was stored on the floppy with the dBase software. But ... I said, if you run it on floppies, then you can start the program before you go to lunch, and it might possibly have completed when you come back! The architect gave me a look as if I was from a different planet. Earlier, they did this kind of checks by hand. For a small bid, it might take a man week, for a large project maybe a man month, maybe more. Now it is done automatically in an hour or two, with no manual effort required at all! Why would they worry about that little hour or two?
This was my first real encounter with The Real World (tm) as a computer man, telling me both that students (I still was one) tend to live in an ivory tower, and customer requirements and expectations may be magnitudes away from what we computer guys dream up in our labs. That goes both ways: Both that reduction from one man month to an hour of waiting is great, and the other way around: We can't do wonders. I have referred to this episode dozens of times as my first real step on the road to becoming a true computer professional.
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You had a very good path.
Similar to my experience. Not building standards, but deeds, titles and plots for real estate. The simplest system was a data entry machine that wrote to floppy and then to tape. It was portable. I took it to a number of small rural title companies where they entered the data. I later collected the data, transferred it to paper for the title company to use for title searches. back in mid 70's, early 80. It was made by NCR if memory serves.
"A little time, a little trouble, your better day"
Badfinger
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trønderen wrote: We made 'graphics' on the line printer from '|' and '-' characters and pixels from white (space) to black (a lot of characters printed on top of each other).
There was an alternative - the Calcomp plotter. You wrote commands to move a pen around with the tip either up or down and could draw whatever complexity of graphics you needed. In my case, when I did my M.Sc. in 1971 I was developing a continuous simulation hydrologic model that could calculate flows at a point on a river over a long period of time using various meteorological data. It had a version which produced hourly flow estimates. With maybe 20 years of data, the hourly output was a lot of numbers. To illustrate the results for my thesis, I plotted a graph of the observed flows and the simulated flows on the Calcomp plotter. The x-axis was about 8 foot long. The first time it ran, the plotter operators turned it off as they thought I'd programmed an infinite loop and was going to ruin an entire roll of their very expensive plotter paper!
RB
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Sure, you had pen plotters, for line drawing. They were nice for engineering drawings, but certainly could not replace an architect's pen drawing of the park around the new house, with kids playing on the grass, people strolling around, trees and flowers, drawn in perspective, filled in with watercolor. Pen plotters were not suited for drawing surfaces as such - they could draw the borderlines of the surface, but not the surface itself, the way and architect could fill in with watercolor or shading with his pen. Any "natural" object would look very un-natural if you attempted to draw them on a pen plotter.
More expensive pen plotters could handle pens of different colors at the same time (with the cheaper single-pen plotters you could of course draw all the red lines first, then replace the pen to draw all the blue lines, and so on, but that was very cumbersome), but limited to clear, saturated colors, no continuous tones. You can't do dithering with a pen potter!
The cornerstone factory of my home town made internationally recognized flatbed plotters of huge sizes - they had a drawing area of up to a few square meters. After creating the engineering drawing, you could replace the plotter with a steel cutter, cutting according to the same plot lines the plates that were to be welded together to a ship hull. (They also had the computer controlling the automatic welding machine.) In those days, it wasn't called 'robotics', but 'numeric control' (NC) tools. I believe that they developed the plotters and steel cutters during the 1960s; their golden age was in the 1970s.
That equipment was most certainly not priced for the hobbyist market 
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True story...one of my sister's first jobs was as a cashier at a small local clothes store. They had a sale going on. A lady bought an item with a 40% discount, and a second with a 30% discount. Dumb-dumb punched it in as a 70% discount off the total. 
The fact that she's spent decades after that working for the government doesn't reassure me.
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dandy72 wrote: The fact that she's spent decades after that working for the government doesn't reassure me.
So that explains the chaos in government over the last few decades!
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-- 6079 Smith W.
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To be fair, I don't think she's made anything worse.
OTOH, I don't think she's made anything better either.
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I can see why the 25% in Maths was justified!
- I would love to change the world, but they won’t give me the source code.
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It looks to me you should have gotten 100% in Maths
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No more “the case is altered” in a legal document (8)
An easy one to start off the New Year (I think!)
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No more
"the case is altered" CEAS
in
a legal document DE ED
DECEASED
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
"Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well-preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming “Wow! What a Ride!" - Hunter S Thompson - RIP
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Yep! Said it was easy...
But... why isn't it just "ceased"? Surely deceased should mean un-ceased, i.e. resumed? 
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Probably the same reason why "flammable" and "inflammable" mean exactly the same thing ... 
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
"Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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And 'raise' means 'to lift up' or 'to tear down'.
And 'cleave' means 'to separate' or 'to join together'.
And 'scissors', 'trousers', 'sheep', 'fish' (plus lots more) are both the same in the singular and the plural.
And 'bough', 'cough', 'dough', 'through', 'thorough', 'enough' do not rhyme with each other (they are pronounced 'bow', 'cof', 'doh', 'throo', 'thurer', 'enuf').
English is a language that has evolved / devolved and taken in words from many other languages; it is not a designed-by-committee language.
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After writing my previous response, I remembered that there is an old poem. I have found it ...
I take it you already know of tough and bough and cough and dough?
Some may stumble, but not you, on hiccough, thorough, slough, and through?
So now you are ready, perhaps, to learn of less familiar traps?
Beware of heard, a dreadful word, that looks like beard, but sounds like bird.
And dead, it's said like bed, not bead; for goodness' sake, don't call it deed!
Watch out for meat and great and threat. (They rhyme with suite and straight and debt.)
A moth is not a moth in mother, nor both in bother, broth in brother.
And here is not a match for there, nor dear and fear, for bear and pear.
And then there's dose and rose and lose - just look them up - and goose and choose
And cork and work and card and ward and font and front and word and sword
And do and go, then thwart and cart, come, come! I've hardly made a start.
A dreadful language? Why man alive! I've learned to talk it when I was five.
And yet to write it, the more I tried, I hadn't learned it at fifty-five.
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though the "tear down" word is to "raze" rather than "raise". Which (I assume) is related to "razor"; i.e. cutting it down, removing completely.
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My mistake. You are correct. Thank you.
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Just say dead its easier 
Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well-preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming “Wow! What a Ride!" - Hunter S Thompson - RIP
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