DELTA applications (was: Beehives...)

[Rich Thomson <rthomson@ptc.com>]

In article <3.0.3.32.19980505125314.009f06a0@pop.infomation.com> ,
    Aron Insinga <ainsinga@infomation.com>  writes:
> Anyway, another application at Delta: The library or library science
> department was doing a PERT simulation of how to migrate from the off-line
> system to the on-line system by entering books into the on-line catalog the
> books as they were checked in.  I don't know what the PERT program they had
> was written in (probably FORTRAN), but I translated it to BASIC so they
> could do their simulations, and became a reference in their paper.  So
> developing these applications, we not only learned more about computers, we
> learned about things in the real-world that people computers happened to
> use computers for.

The big application I remember at DELTA, circa '79, was the SIGE(sp?)
relational database of 2 year and 4 year colleges.  At Newark High, the
DELTA terminal resided in the career counselling office, staffed by
Mr.  Robeson at first and later by another man whose name escapes me at
the moment.  (I remember he was Irish because he had a "rubber bullet"
on his desk -- it was hard rubber like a shotput and was about the size
of a soda can -- he liked to keep it there as a reminder of what it
really meant when the TV said "they shot rubber bullets into the crowd
to disperse it.").  At NHS, since we had those Wang computers that
Ralph mentioned for teaching programming, noone used the DELTA terminal
for anything except running the SIGE program to select potential
colleges.  This allowed me to pretty much have the DELTA terminal to
myself whenever I had a free period in high school.

I remember on one of our DEC user's group meetings we travelled to the
place where they developed SIGE.  (It seems that all the other PDP-11
installations in our local area were much more deprived than DELTA; I
remember that they had only 11/34s and 11/40s and only a few had an
11/50, so we were "kings" with an 11/70!)  At SIGE they showed us some
of their experiments in "future educational computing" and proudly
pointed to a Commodore PET computer!  What a funky keyboard!

I also recall that the RSTS/E SIG (special interest group) in the DEC
community was so grateful to use for the enhancements we made to
various CUSPs.  I recall that Bob's enhancements to DIRECT were
extremely popular.

PS: Given the nature of disk storage management on DOS machines,
    sometimes I wish I still had PIP so I could do 'PIP *.*/ZE/DE' :)
--
                                               Rich Thomson
                                               rthomson@ptc.com