not just the terminals. the bookshelf with the documentation was in the terminal room.

(buy a VAX, get a library. oh, and a computer too.)

the 6 months after the first screen editor was installed was constant questions and answers bouncing across the room on how to do things.

You are predicting the weather by saying tomorrow will be just like today.

Which has a good track record of being right, most of the time.

I agree!

I am ashamed to say that my mind could not understand these 'mac behaviors'. in my mind, closing the shell does not mean 'shut down the machine (or make it standby). maybe i have a job running. maybe i am ssh'ed into it. likewise, when it is opened up, why does it un-standby or turn on?

very confusing that the computer thinks it knows what i want; when i can push the power button to turn it on, or /sbin/shutdown -h now when i want it off.

The E and S rack was an 'image generator'. That one was called an SP1. I fondly remember the SP3T as being the pinnacle of that series; the T meant "texture processing".

image a computer display made up of 1000 line segments. that is what you would get. it was possible to buy these with an output that was not raster, rather it drew on the CRT with vector segments. incredible light points to simulate night landings.

what you have there is a coding sheet for a GP4. a stored program computer, with drum memory.

eventually, the company would call that a 'system design and mechanization report', which would document the math and equations needed to correctly simulate a small part of an aircraft.

note the marking "link division of general precision". the computer was made by General Precision, of which the Link aviation company was the biggest customer. i had always been told that Link purchased General Precision, but perhaps it was the other way around.

i worked in this industry for about 35 years. this stuff was ancient and forgotten about when I started.

waterfall and ada.

you used to have a thing called preliminary design (i think is specified in 2167A).

with ada, you write all the specs. so, all of the packages procedures / functions and visible variables are declared.

Feed this to the compiler. Does it compile? If yes, then your design is complete.

Implement the bodies during detail design.

JOVIAL. A blast from the past. At one time I was saving programmers manuals for JOVIAL compilers. (why? perhaps some mental defect or disease).

Late 1990's I was contacted via e-mail by someone that was looking for a JOVIAL manual. So, cool, I asked him which one? Hughes Aircraft? Boeing? Boeing J3B2?

not just the priorities, the overall skill and education of programmers.

in the 1980/1990's i was a dumb kid. problems of large systems were not in my mind. having to type begin/end instead of {} was, i thought, a valid complaint.

with experience, education, and hindsight, most of the advantages of the ada language were not understood by the masses. if ada came out today, it would have taken off just like rust.

I'd say that if the original Ada was introduced at the same time as Rust development started then people would pick Rust. Ada is also a product of its time would have to be modernized quite a bit.

Given how similar the syntax is of C, C++, Javascript, and Go, I think a language with the syntax of Ada would have a hard time.

the gnat people needed to make a living. there were several impediments to widespread use of gnat, like the runtime license.

not that it was their responsibility to provide a free compiler to the masses.

academics loved ada when it came out. it was a very sophisticated language for it's day.

same is true today. the spec/body separation made for an actual delineation between design and implementation.