My Best Bug | #58

I shipped a word processor that formatted the hard drive every 1024 saves. Must have '84 or '85. I was a bright 25-year-old with about five years in the game. I was one of two programmers who wrote & maintained a suite of apps kinda like Office: spreadsheet, wp, database, plotter, such like. We customized everything for three or four vertical markets. So I wrote most of the wp. This was in Forth, on a variety of OS/CPU combinations. Young'uns don't necessarily know this, but in those fays there'd be a new microcomputer with a custom OS and one of several CPU's every *month* or so. Forth used block-based disk i/o. Each block was 1kb in length, and to save anything larger than 1kb, you ended up with a file master block that would contain offsets to the blocks that had the data, basically a pair of lists, allocated and none. To initialize that file master, I'd fill it with zero's. And away we go! --- You can read the full transcription of this podcast over on GeePawHill.org. Any feedback, you can always tweet @GeePawHill on Twitter, or drop a voice message via the voice messages link here on Anchor. If you are interested in becoming more involved in the Change-Harvesting community, click here to learn how to join GeePaw's Camerata.