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From: Lars Poulsen <lars@cleo.beagle-ears.com>
Newsgroups: comp.unix.shell
Subject: Re: Lew Pitcher still around?
Date: Sat, 10 May 2025 15:38:10 -0000 (UTC)
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On 2025-05-10, Lew Pitcher <lew.pitcher@digitalfreehold.ca> wrote:
> On Sat, 10 May 2025 06:21:20 +0000, Percival John Hackworth wrote:
>
>> On May 9, 2025 at 9:02:49 AM PDT, "Lew Pitcher"
>> <lew.pitcher@digitalfreehold.ca> wrote:
>> 
>>> Hi, Rubin
>>> 
>>> On Thu, 08 May 2025 22:02:07 +0000, Ruben Safir wrote:
>>> 
>>>> Did Lew retire?
>>> 
>>> About 17 years ago, I retired from my job.
>>> But, I still hang around here (and other newsgroups) just to keep in touch.
>> 
>> Did you work for SoCalEdison in Rosemead in the 1970s?
>
> Sorry, Percival, but no. I worked for a large Canadian bank for 30ish years,
> starting in 1977 (I retired at an early age). The closest I've got to working
> in the US was a couple of work trips to Memphis :-)
>
>>I came with a couple
>> UCLA professors, one a geochemist and the other an Organic Chemist. We talked
>> about a database of organics found in air, I think. I ended writing it in
>> FORTRAN on a PDP-11/05 in a prof's lab.
>
> That must have been some feat. Database technology was in it's infancy
> then and, while the PDP 11/05 was a capable beast, it was underpowered
> by today's standards.
>  
> Glad to see that we "well-experienced programmers" <grin> still keep in touch.

Well, 11/05 was the 11/10 when it was sold through the OEM sales channel
from Digital, and the 11/10 was a more compact second generation of the
11/20, which I think was the first PDP-11.

It was slow by today's standard, and IIRC there was no floating point
hardware. But slow CPU just meant "have patience". "Database" meant a
collection of data. You could try to roll your own ISAM, but mostly we
worked in a batch mode merging new data into a sequential file in a
"copy and update" pass. But it would be unusual to have more than a
couple of MB of hard drive (RK05).