Hacker News: GnarfGnarf

New comment by GnarfGnarf in "Come for ENIAC, Stay for UNIVAC and Skeduflo"

GnarfGnarf — Sun, 30 Aug 2026 15:16:56 +0000

The company started out with RPG. There was no COBOL compiler. They had to start processing health claims on paper tape, which could only be read with Assembler. They hired me to learn & write Assembler. We converted the master file update (40,000 cards, two hours twice a day) to Assembler, when I discovered a way to store 240 digits per card: twelve bits/column = three decimal digits. It was the 70's (7 = 0111), so our cards looked like lace doilies. Reconstructing jammed cards was fun.

I left the company after three years because I could only compile & test at night or on weekends.

New comment by GnarfGnarf in "Come for ENIAC, Stay for UNIVAC and Skeduflo"

GnarfGnarf — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 13:00:21 +0000

The Assembler (Basic Assembler Language or BAL) was for the Univac 9300 and 9400, clones of the IBM 360. Univac originally made and sold the 1100 series, with the Exec 8 O/S. The 1100 was a 36-bit machine, very successful in airline reservation systems, petroleum exploration, etc. but it was incompatible with IBM's 360 architecture. Univac developed the 9000 so IBM customers could easily convert.

The 9300 I programmed had 32K, tape drives, card reader & punch. It ran NCOS (Non-Concurrent OS). It had no virtual memory, so we had to write our own "overlays", sections of code that were loaded at beginning and end of a run, for initialization and wrapping up. No console, just sixteen lights to display error numbers, and eight butterfly switches for writing directly to memory.

Imagine running an insurance company on 32K!

New comment by GnarfGnarf in "Come for ENIAC, Stay for UNIVAC and Skeduflo"

GnarfGnarf — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 16:31:12 +0000

I was a Systems Analyst. I helped salesmen prepare proposals, I did benchmarks and conversions, and customer training. Univac couldn't afford to put a computer in every branch, so I had less access and opportunity to program, than our customers. Made support awkward.

We also had internal competition and friction. The 9000 and 1100 teams resented if their technology was not pitched to a prospective customer. The 9000 was lower-end than 1100, but there was enough overlap in the mid-range.

I also programmed the CADE 1900, a data entry system that paid for many trips throughout Canada and the U.S.

Before that, I wrote apps in IBM mainframe Assembler for a life insurance company.

(Sorry I didn't reply sooner, I had not seen the question).

New comment by GnarfGnarf in "I should have loved biology (2020)"

GnarfGnarf — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 10:48:33 +0000

I should have loved Latin. I should have loved Greek.

New comment by GnarfGnarf in "Come for ENIAC, Stay for UNIVAC and Skeduflo"

GnarfGnarf — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 19:48:16 +0000

I worked for Sperry Univac 1974/78. Great bunch of people. It’s a shame their resources were diluted over so many different operating systems.

New comment by GnarfGnarf in "C++: The Documentary"

GnarfGnarf — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 10:24:24 +0000

What, you rewrote std::deque? Whew!

New comment by GnarfGnarf in "Iliad fragment found in Roman-era mummy"

GnarfGnarf — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 09:22:23 +0000

It’s heartbreaking to think of what treasures were lost when they were using mummies as locomotive fuel in the 19th century.

New comment by GnarfGnarf in "Electrical transformer manufacturing is throttling the electrified future"

GnarfGnarf — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 12:03:02 +0000

Perhaps, but municipal water runs by gravity whereas your well pump doesn’t operate during a power failure.

New comment by GnarfGnarf in "DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market"

GnarfGnarf — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 12:20:16 +0000

SBC = Single Board Computing Betriebsblind

New comment by GnarfGnarf in "Banned C++ features in Chromium"

GnarfGnarf — Sat, 24 Jan 2026 20:05:04 +0000

Agree. I love UDLs, use them in my code for improved legibility. I hadn’t realized how badly you can screw up if you don’t define all the operators correctly.

New comment by GnarfGnarf in "Banned C++ features in Chromium"

GnarfGnarf — Sat, 24 Jan 2026 18:11:41 +0000

I thought User-Defined Literals were a great idea until I saw all the pitfalls listed in the Google style document. Dangerous indeed.

New comment by GnarfGnarf in "De-dollarization: Is the US dollar losing its dominance? (2025)"

GnarfGnarf — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 17:34:13 +0000

The UK was not part of the Euro economy.

New comment by GnarfGnarf in "Linux is good now"

GnarfGnarf — Thu, 01 Jan 2026 21:24:21 +0000

I'm a Windows/macOS developer, but I strongly feel that all national governments need to convert to Linux, for strategic sovereignty.

(My customer demographic is seniors & casual users).

New comment by GnarfGnarf in "The state of Schleswig-Holstein is consistently relying on open source"

GnarfGnarf — Sun, 07 Dec 2025 13:48:31 +0000

I'm a Windows/macOS developer, but I strongly feel that all national governments need to convert to Linux, for strategic sovereignty. I'm sure Microsoft, under orders from the U.S. government, could disable all computers in any country or organization, at the flick of a switch.

Imagine how Open Source Software could improve if a consortium of nations put their money and resources into commissioning bug fixes and enhancements, which would be of collective benefit.

Apart from a few niche cases, the needs of most government bureaucracies would be well served by currently available OSS word processing, spreadsheet, presentation and graphics software.

New comment by GnarfGnarf in "Qt Creator 18 Released"

GnarfGnarf — Mon, 03 Nov 2025 11:48:16 +0000

Qt has many good features, but it is not as robust as Visual Studio. It can lock up while debugging. will take you to the extern in the same module, not the actual definition. Variable expansion during debugging is slow. You can’t display a.b.c, you have to expand all of ‘a’, then all of ‘a.b’

New comment by GnarfGnarf in "The Beauty of Programming (2001)"

GnarfGnarf — Sat, 27 Sep 2025 19:34:33 +0000

Totally describes my experience, since 1965.

New comment by GnarfGnarf in "Brutalita Sans: An Experimental Font and Font Editor"

GnarfGnarf — Thu, 25 Sep 2025 13:29:55 +0000

I appreciate how lower-case ‘L’, digit ‘1’ and upper-case ‘I’ are differentiated. Also alpha ‘O’ and zero.

New comment by GnarfGnarf in "Modern CI is too complex and misdirected (2021)"

GnarfGnarf — Wed, 20 Aug 2025 09:52:42 +0000

CI = Continuous Integration

New comment by GnarfGnarf in "Financial lessons from my family's experience with long-term care insurance"

GnarfGnarf — Sat, 02 Aug 2025 16:14:33 +0000

There are three things a nation needs to accept about universal health care:

(1) It’s expensive (2) Everybody has to pay (3) The government’s gotta run it

New comment by GnarfGnarf in "Open Source Maintenance Fee"

GnarfGnarf — Thu, 24 Jul 2025 19:38:31 +0000

The WiX installer is a byzantine incomprehensible mess. Its only appeal was that it was free. If I have to pay, I'd rather have a commercial product that is supported and easier to use.

Rob Mensching was supposed to monetize WiX by offering $5,000/yr enterprise consulting & support services. I guess that's not enough.