It didn’t add up!

A savvy workman knows that sometimes you DO blame the tool

Burroughs B20, like our earlier machines, from Vintage Computing. Yes, that really is a clipboard built into the front of the main computer housing.

Back in the late 1980’s, my job at Griffin Coal Mining included occasional programming, although I had moved mostly into being the VAX mainframe sysadmin.

We had Convergent Technologies and Burroughs workstations and I had to build some number-crunching programs to help mining engineers with production estimates.

just the presence of the maths code was causing things to break.

Funny side-story: I had a typical overly-specified experience working on this code. The mining engineer initially wanted me to report Average Production to four decimal places. Fortunately, my boss was an ex-RAF engineer and I mentioned this to him and how I thought it was giving a false impression of precision, as the input data included an assumption that all trucks carried 150t of coal. They had a little engineer-engineer chat about numbers and we stopped wasting column space on decimals.

Ubiquitous FORTRAN

If we had an ability to program on a given machine around the office, it seemed likely that someone had installed a FORTRAN compiler on it. Besides, all engineers speak FORTRAN 🤐.

So I got into coding away and everything was good.