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Re: What is the oldest computer that could be used today for real work? [message #411099 is a reply to message #411097] Sat, 18 September 2021 21:55 Go to previous messageGo to previous message
John Levine is currently offline  John Levine
Messages: 1405
Registered: December 2011
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According to Thomas Koenig <tkoenig@netcologne.de>:
>>>> > >> You can still run programs compiled on a 360 on the latest ā€œzā€ box.

> There are a couple of things that could go wrong, though, especially
> if the problem sizes have grown, as they tend to do.
>
> Tradeoffs between disk speed and memory made in the 1980s may not
> work as well when the relative performances of CPU and discs have
> diverged as much as they did, and there is a factor of 10^n more
> data to process, and all of a sudden you find there is this
> n^2 algorithm hidden somewhere...

Nobody is claiming we still run *all* of the code written in the 1960s.

I gather there is some code where for financial reasons it has to produce
results the same as what it has produced for the past forty years, even
though the programmer who wrote it has retired or died, even though
the results may depend on funky details of the 360's ill-designed floating
point, or of shift-and-round-decimal instructions where for some reason
it uses a rounding digit of 6 rather than the normal 5.

It can be worth a lot to keep running the actual code rather than trying
to reverse engineer it and hope you got all the warts right for every case.
--
Regards,
John Levine, johnl@taugh.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly
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