Re: Datasheet-flation?

I worked with (with not for, briefly!) a company that had an engineer make one thing work somehow and then sent it to manufacturing and told them to make copies. No drawings, no schematics.

Ok, but the LabWindows IDE of the time would possibly explode. That thing converted code C <-> Basic, so the C language you could use was limited.

Besides, I would tell my boss not to pay him or to sue.

Right.

I'll manage. :) OTOH, "Liz" has exhibited extraordinary obtusity IRO this very simple matter and will have to live with THAT stain on "her" reputation.

Toads as well.

Do you have any facts to back that up with? ;-)

It's a terrible burden when I eventually get to the truth and find I was right all along. Don't worry, I'll get over it after a bit of retail therapy.

No - you'll just have to take my word for it. ;-)

That could be

Correct, that's why they hired me ;-)

There is that. He would have to pay that programmer in the future for any small modification of the program, though. And he did want a few modifications (the specs from the client got modified as they saw the result)

Ski lift tickets are cheaper than therapists, and more fun.

Billions!

On 12/2/24 14:19, Carlos E.R. wrote: [...]

That's surprising from a person comfortable with software. I found algebraic entry calculators clumsy. I went the opposite way.

What gripe do you have with RPN?

Jeroen Belleman

I enter calculations in the calculators in the same way I do when I write Pascal, C, Basic, or plain language.

Not human.

Free32 is nice on my phone. A little quirky.

The real HP calcs are slowly dying. HP did a newer one that was so awful I threw it away. Probably Chinese junk.

Towards the end, HP was labeling cheap stuff, like Rigol scopes.

Read

The HP Way by David Packard

and then

The Journey by Carly Fiorina.

Do you program in Basic? It is not popular with the coder culture.

I loved Basic-Plus on the Dec RSTS time-share system.

I use the PowerBasic Console Compiler now. It's awesome. It has stuff like PRINT USING$ and TCP OPEN and 80-bit floats.

I have a few ee programs I could share.

I had to maintain programs made by other people before me, in Basic. Before that job I did a bit of Basic with borrowed Spectrums, and then Casio calculators had Basic.

In the engineering world, engineers in the 80's figured out things that could be done with computers, and they pioneered the field, in Basic, because PCs came with it, and it appeared simple enough. They had the engineering knowledge of their field, and learning Basic they invented things that could be done with computers that a computer profesional would not have imagined.

We owe a lot to them.

This is an electronics group, so perhaps you tried Microcaps (80s). At the time I saw it I think it was Microcaps II. You could draw an schematic and test it in your PC. It was done in compiled Basic. And it had bugs, crashes that the interpreter had not bumped into (like dividing by zero) that made the compiled program to crash. Some of the bugs a proper compiled language would have detected at compile time.

Sorry, I don't do much programming nowdays...