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Path: utzoo!mnetor!seismo!kitty!larry
From: larry@kitty.UUCP (Larry Lippman)
Newsgroups: comp.misc
Subject: Re: Young whipper-snappers and 1130's
Message-ID: <1638@kitty.UUCP>
Date: Sat, 7-Mar-87 00:47:28 EST
Article-I.D.: kitty.1638
Posted: Sat Mar  7 00:47:28 1987
Date-Received: Sun, 8-Mar-87 12:13:25 EST
References: <43116@beno.seismo.CSS.GOV> <499@ima.UUCP> <1197@uwmacc.UUCP>
Organization: Recognition Research Corp., Clarence, NY
Lines: 36
Summary: NCR computers

In article <1197@uwmacc.UUCP>, ejnorman@uwmacc.UUCP (Eric Norman) writes:
> 
> Just out of curiosity, anyone out there ever programmed an NCR 304?
> It's what I was raised and weaned on.

	Not a 304, but I did have a brief experience with an NCR Century
in 1976.  From what I understand, the Century was just as UN-state-of-the-art
in 1976 as the 304 was in its own prime 10 years earlier.
	I designed a custom microprocessor-based system for a department
store chain that interfaced a Kimball ticket reader to a mag tape drive which
wrote a tape that could be read on the Century.  The Kimball ticket reader was
originally designed to use an IBM 523 summary punch to create cards that could
be read by the Century - a costly and inefficient process indeed!  Kimball
tickets were a weird multi-part tag with an x-y array of punched holes, used
primarily in retail stores for inventory control/sales reporting; they are now
obsolete.
	The Century (which had a whole 32 K core) was programmed in a
weird language catted NEAT-3.  It was necessary for the Century application
program to perform some bit manipulation and combinatorial logic on the
raw data read from the mag tape.  This type of programming was totally beyond
the comprehension of the store's programmers (what's a "shift_"?; "modulo",
that's an Italian word, isn't it? :-( ), and NEAT-3 lacked any suitable
instructions for bitwise operations.  While I wasn't supposed to do
any of the Century programming, in frustration I had to write the interface
program in NEAT-3.  As a person whose programming experience was scientific
and not business, working with the Century and NEAT-3 was _torture_; what
should have been 20 lines of assembly language code took 200 lines in
NEAT-3!
	This Century and NEAT-3 experience was so horrible that it left me
with a serious prejudice against NCR, which was fortunately overcome 2 years
ago when I discovered the NCR Tower.

<>  Larry Lippman @ Recognition Research Corp., Clarence, New York
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