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From: primer_b@husc4.harvard.edu (jeremy primer)
Newsgroups: talk.bizarre,comp.misc
Subject: LA and the IBM 1130
Message-ID: <980@husc6.UUCP>
Date: Sat, 10-Jan-87 15:20:12 EST
Article-I.D.: husc6.980
Posted: Sat Jan 10 15:20:12 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 10-Jan-87 23:01:39 EST
References: <482@uwm-cs.UUCP>
Sender: news@husc6.UUCP
Reply-To: primer@husc4.harvard.edu (jeremy primer)
Distribution: na
Organization: Harvard Math Asylum
Lines: 49
Keywords: errogenous zones
Summary: prehistoric linker-loader
Xref: mnetor talk.bizarre:782 comp.misc:76

Like most absurities, this one from Dr. B. Litow REALLY comes from IBM:

>Report from the City of Our Lady of the Angels: (So. Pasadena)
>(official statewide designators for the chief regions of California)
>1. NOCAL  begins at Santa Barbara and ends at the North Pole.
>2. SOCAL  begins around the VICTORY DRIVE exit of the PASADENA FREEWAY and
>ends in the twilight zone.
>3. LOCAL  begins south of LA (whatever that means) and ends in Peru.

IBM etymology (c. 1960):

// XEQ PROGR L  2
*LOCAL SUBA,SUBB,SUBC
*NOCAL DEBUG

tells an IBM 1130 to load and XEQute the program PROGR, that  |
the subroutines SUBA, SUBB, SUBC are not needed               |
simultaneously, so they should be fetched from disk into the  | LOCAL
Load On CALl area whenever they are called.  Remember, the    |
core memory--made of core--is only 16K or 32K.  Overlay city. |

Also, load DEBUG in as part of the executable image even      |
though PROGR never calls it--that's NO CAll Load--and we'll   | NOCAL
just toggle some switches on the front panel to invoke the    |
DEBUGger if anything goes wrong.                              |

SOCAL is not something the programmer does, but something     |
the IBM 1130 does to the programmer.  If s/he just said       |
                                                              |
// XEQ PROGR                                                  | SOCAL
                                                              |
and didn't tell the operating system which subroutines to     | [the
LOCAL (overlay) and the whole thing ran out of core, the      |  booby
object loader would create its own overlays.  System load On  |  prize]
CALl.  The I/O routines come into core when PROGR wants to    |
do I/O, the disk I/O when PROGR does disk I/O (I haven't      |
told you how to do that--next posting :-), and the            |
arithmetic routines when PROGR is calculating.  SOCALs also   |
happen in the presence of your LOCALs, if PROGR is Just Too   |
Big and Stupid (cf. Mikki 'n' Pooh's adventures).             |

No, it won't fit in your bedroom.

Somewhere between Victory Drive and the Pasadena Freeway is
where the worst bottlenecks must occur, if the So. Pasadena
hack-o-crats built California as a faithful respresentation
of an IBM 1130.

	Jeremy primer@husc4.harvard.edu