ODDS AND ENDS OF INTEREST



	Origin of the term DEBUG.

		During WWII, the war department was using the Mark I
	computer, your basic monsterous machine that gobbled up electricity
	and raditated a huge amount of heat. The machine was used for
	targeting, trajectory  and fuel consumption calculations. Since
	these were the days before air conditioning, the machine was run
	mostly at night. The machine was made of up a lot of mechanical
	flip-flops (one of the primary gates in any computer). One night
	the computer failed to function and it was found that a moth had
	given up the ghost when caught by one of the flip-flop contacts.
	It is not hard to imagine, that the running joke was something to
	do with whether or not someone had "debugged" the machine lately.
	The rest is history or frustration or something.


	Origin of the GW in GWBASIC

		No big deal here, the GW stands for Gee Whiz

About Programming

	"Programming is a series of discoveries leading you from one plateau
	of understanding to another... The trick is not to step in the stuff
	between the plateaus."

		- taken from a cartoon

More about programming

	"Computer programmers are among the great innovators of our times.
	Unhappily, among their most enduring accomplishments are several new
	techniques for wasting time. There is no shortage of horror stories
	about programs that took twenty times as long to debug as they did to
	"write". And one hears again and again about programs that had to be
	started over several times because they were not well thought out
	the first time around. But much less is said of what may be the most
	successfully mastered time-wasting technique among students of
	programming: finding information about the machine. Spending hours
	trying to locate a single, simple fact is a veritable rite of passage
	for new programmers - as is ripping up reference books in a red-eyed
	frenzy.
		A typical programmer's morning after CRT eye strain, a six
	foot pile of crumpled printouts, and two dozen reference books all over
	the floor. Among these books are hardware tech reference manuals, DOS
	tech reference manuals, language reference manuals, spec sheets on
	particular chips, hardware manuals for printers and boards, plus
	a dozen or so computer books, each possessing some prized bit of
	information required at 3 AM by a particularly intricate bit of code."

		- taken from "PROGRAMMER'S PROBLEM SOLVER" by Robert Jourdain


	"The truth is incontrovertible. Panic may resent it; ignorance may
	 deride it; malice may distort it; but there it is."

				Winston Churchill

End of file

Downloaded From P-80 International Information Systems 304-744-2253