Stephen Johnson writes:

>>> Johnson Stephen <[log in to unmask]>
11/07/97 08:45am >>>
->OUT OF THE CLOSET ......
I've been watching this conversation for the last few
days...............
All languages have there usefulness for a particular application
Not all (C, COBOL,TRANSACT,PROTOS) can do just what you want
everytime.

I was the original test site back in ??75 for Transact....great
I wrote the Saudi Arabian BOM in PROTOS
I have written COBOL VIEW for 25 years and still do
I use 4GL for large extract drive files linked to another language
program
I use C  at home on PC applications

< balance snipped >
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What kind of years are you using, years on Mercury or Venus, cause
they can't be earth years.  As it turns out, David Dummer the creator of
Transact, or as it was known then as IMACS, created the language
around 1979 and did a lot of testing and program writing at my company
Silton Data.  The owners of Silton were partners with David, and another
programmer and I at Silton wrote the first commercial applications in
IMACS.  It was so slow and so cumbersome to use, we abandoned it
and rewrote the applications in Cobol.  How primitive was it then; the
equivalent of the Cobol perform verb did not exist.  You had to go to
wherever you wanted and set a switch to know where to go back to.

As far as 25 years of VPlus, V/3000 or plain old View as those of us
that are long in tooth call it, that would mean it came out in 1972 with the
original HP3000.  Funny when I started on the 3000 in 1978, we were
using Data Entry Library (DEL) for block mode screen applications and
didn't switch to View until the early 1980's.  Indeed the HP Data Entry and
Forms Management System (VPLUS/V) Reference Manual has a first
edition date of Nov 1978, last updated Nov 1987!!

Mike Berkowitz
Guess? Inc.