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Ah, thanks for clearing things up. | 326 comments | Create New Account
Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.
Ah, thanks for clearing things up.
Authored by: Wol on Thursday, January 31 2013 @ 07:17 AM EST
:-) the joys of old software :-)

One of my first tasks as a junior programmer was documenting a pile of FORTRAN
code (FORTRAN II?). It had been written to run as a series of chained programs
on a machine with 64K ram and no virtual memory.

We rewrote it to run on a machine with virtual memory. We were writing a project
management system to compete with Metier Artemis, and this code sorted stuff by
start and end nodes in order to work out the critical path.

I rewrote the sorting algorithm (because we now had so much more memory :-) and
when we tested it, we set the old algorithm sorting a 6000-node network when we
came in in the morning. I then rewrote the algorithm, my colleague changed it
and introduced a nasty bug so I had to tell him off and fix it, and then we set
the new version going.

All on the self-same mini-computer (Pr1me 25/30, 256K ram). The revised version
finished before lunch. The original version, by the time we went home, had hit
the 3000 mark and was noticeably slowing down. So we killed it and assumed the
new version was the best :-)

Cheers,
Wol

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

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