I spent 20+ years in my day job programming in BASIC on OpenVMS without using line numbers or GOTO's. Yet the first thing I did here was fall back to my childhood Sinclair/BBC BASIC of trying 10 PRINT "Hello" 20 GOTO 10

Can you talk about what you worked on in BASIC on VMS?

Software for the Agribusiness sector - mostly around the manufacture and selling of animal feed. So data entry, processing, interfacing, reporting. We had the legacy system which was a text terminal interface, as well as a newer browser based system that interfaced via webservices to the OpenVMS BASIC code. After 40 years it went end of life at the end of last year.

Wow, thank you for sharing!

I'm not surprised that the system lasted that long! VMS is legendary.

I've looked through the documentation for OpenVMS BASIC and it does seem like it was a nice platform.

The entire VMS system appears to be quite a comfy environment to have worked in. (DCL, help system, documentation, standard libraries, multiple languages (Pascal, C, BASIC))

It was quite advanced BASIC, so I imagine any kind of business application.

https://support.hpe.com/hpesc/public/docDisplay?docId=emr_na...

Hey pjmlp!

Yes indeed. The docs for VMS are great. Really cool environment.

On an unrelated note, have you seen this video yet?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31701231

Very G-rated. It was always

10 PRINT "BOOBS" 20 GOTO 10

in all the department stores where I grew up...

Perhaps Google just wanted to scare businesses on the legacy plan into migrating to the paid service, expecting that those who could afford to pay wouldn't leave it to the last minute.

I would be suspicious if I got a message on linkedin that wasn't a recruitment message.

A use case is crowded rush hour trains where space for bikes is at a premium

If Merc had pitted Lewis, Max would have stayed out and gained P1. At that stage Merc didn't know if the race would have finished under the safety car. They'd have looked equally foolish if it had as they'd have looked to have given up P1 for no reason.

I'm likely going to blindly say yes every time I get the dialog out of habit. Making it useless.

One minute they're suspending use of AstraZeneca, the next they're complaining they aren't getting enough deliveries of the vaccine they don't want to use.

He didn't come up with that one (he wished he did), he just worked on the Mars account at the time

Ah right. Well, I wished he did too with the amount of people I've told over the years :D

I heard that Salman Rushdie came up with the "Naughty but nice." slogan for cream cakes.

Also remember that popular home computers often went from say ZX Spectrums (Cassette) to Amiga/Atari ST (3.5 floppy) - so there was no intermediate 5.25 floppy stage.

That's gotta be a European thing. In the US, cassette drives were pretty much non-existent (in favor of 5.25" floppy drives) from at least the mid-80's onward, at least. I personally have absolutely no memory whatsoever of ever seeing anyone actually use a cassette drive to load programs on a computer. (though I did read about it in books on occasion). And I was a kid during the era of the Apple IIe's popularity, with machines of its ilk being my first exposure to computers.

Even into the 386/486 era, at least before CD-ROM drives were commonplace, it was common for computers to have both 5.25" and 3.5" drives and to find software in either format.

It's pedantry and missing your point about progression to 3.5", but given this is wallowing in retro - you can't forget that the ZX Spectrum went to Microdrive and then, with the Spectrum+3, to the 3" (not 3.5") floppy :)

https://www.sintech-shop.co.uk/zx-microdrive/a-3035/

https://www.dataserve-retro.co.uk/contents/en-uk/d56.html

Same here, Commodore V20 cassette & cartridge to Tandy 1000TL/2 3.5” single density.

Would those people who truly care about 60fps also care about resolution, so have a 1080p or 4K screen? I would like to think most people watching at 720p would be happy with 30fps.