IBMWatson autobiographythoughts on 768

Anne & Lynn Wheeler

I presume in the early days of computing the hardware was so incredibly expensive compared to programmer wages that software cost wasn't as big as a concern yet. Programmers spent a heck of a lot of time shoehorning applications into a tiny memory space, detecting and recovering from numerous hardware errors, and pushing the technical envelope with fancy tricks.

At some point along the way good programmers became scarce. Further, at some point along the way the curves of the cost of hardware vs. the cost of software crossed and atbreastudes changed.

I remember a comp sci teacher telling us that Fortran logical IFs were inefficient and to use arithmetic IFs instead (never found out if that was really true on S-360 or B-5500. As a team leader, I pushed COBOL COMP-3 for numeric fields and COMP SYNC for internal fields such as subscripts. I still use that stuff but for modest sized files it doesn't seem to make much run-time difference with today's superfast machines. If my employer's mainframe isn't real busy a complex job runs in less than a second! (And this mainframe does the work of four older ones).

P.S. Saw the write up on your as a computer historian in a recent IBM magazine. Neat article, congratulations!